A Visa Unless Your Country Was Designated, and Designation Turns on Refusal Rates
The United States requires a visitor visa from everyone except nationals of countries designated as programme countries under the visa waiver statute. Designation is not an agreement and not a reward: the Secretary of Homeland Security may designate a country only if it meets statutory qualifications, and the first of them is arithmetic - the average refusal rate for visitor visas from that country over the two previous fiscal years must have been under 2 per cent, and under 2.5 per cent in either of them. A country whose nationals are refused often cannot be designated, which means the test measures how the United States has been treating that country's travellers.
At a glance
- Who needs a visa
- Everyone whose country is not a designated programme country
- Which country of this corpus is designated
- Chile, and no other
The designation list is maintained administratively; the statute sets the test rather than the list.
- The refusal rate test
- Under 2 per cent average over two fiscal years, and under 2.5 per cent in either
Section 1187(c)(2)(A)(i).
- Who decides
- The Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State
- What the test measures
- How often the United States refused that country's travellers
Requirements
- A visitor visa, unless your country has been designated a programme country
- For a designated country: the conditions the same section imposes on the traveller
Exceptions by origin
No exceptions recorded
Nothing we have read treats any nationality differently for this topic. The rule above applies to everyone.
What the law says
«(c) Designation of program countries (1) In general The Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State, may designate any country as a program country if it meets the requirements of paragraph (2). (2) Qualifications Except as provided in subsection (f), a country may not be designated as a program country unless the following requirements are met: (A) Low nonimmigrant visa refusal rate Either— (i) the average number of refusals of nonimmigrant visitor visas for nationals of that country during— (I) the two previous full fiscal years was less than 2.0 percent of the total number of nonimmigrant visitor visas for nationals of that country wh»The designation power and the arithmetic that gates it. The quotation ends where the stored line ends; the condition continues into the following clause.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The Government Publishing Office's authenticated repository. The United States Code is published here edition by edition, one HTML file per section, at an address that names the edition year - and a link service resolves a title and section number to the current edition's file.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: An edition is a snapshot: the 2024 edition states the law as of a date in 2024 and says nothing about amendments made since. The Code is itself a compilation of acts, and for titles not enacted into positive law the Statutes at Large govern where the two differ. Nothing here carries the regulations, which are in the Code of Federal Regulations, or the annual notices that fill in the numbers these sections leave open.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
Practical notes
This record is the statutory test. Which countries stand designated today is an administrative list, and a designation can be suspended, so the record names Chile as the one state of this corpus on it rather than reproducing the list.
Admission is a separate decision from the visa or the waiver: the statute's other subsections set what a traveller must do and what an officer may still refuse.
- consolidates8 U.S.C. § 1187, visa waiver program
GovInfo, U.S. Government Publishing Office · consolidated to 2024
About this source
The Government Publishing Office's authenticated repository. The United States Code is published here edition by edition, one HTML file per section, at an address that names the edition year - and a link service resolves a title and section number to the current edition's file.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: An edition is a snapshot: the 2024 edition states the law as of a date in 2024 and says nothing about amendments made since. The Code is itself a compilation of acts, and for titles not enacted into positive law the Statutes at Large govern where the two differ. Nothing here carries the regulations, which are in the Code of Federal Regulations, or the annual notices that fill in the numbers these sections leave open.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source