Political Quotes

“I take the time today to express my strong support for H.R. 2578, which is of vital importance to many areas that rely on tourism, including my own home island of Guam where we get over 1.2 million tourists a year, many of them from Japan. Today I want to speak about an amendment that I have printed in the Record which I will explain in the course of general debate now and withdraw later on. Guam has a Guam-only Visa Waiver Program which is separate from this general Visa Waiver Program. In our Guam-only Visa Waiver Program, visitors are allowed to come from countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan for 15 days, and there are 14 other countries on that list. One of the issues that always affects the people of Guam, which has a large number of Philippino Americans, is how to deal with family events; and what we have been proposing and what we have been working towards with a locally organized task force for the past 4 years is to set up a pilot project within the scope of this Guam-only Visa Waiver Program, to run a pilot project for 1 year, allowing 100 citizens of the Philippines to come in under a Visa Waiver Program per month and to determine subsequent to that whether such a program can be realistically enforced on a longer-term basis.”