Good Day, Cato Podcast Listeners. Today is Tuesday, January 30th, and I'm Anastasia Glova, your host.

In a new Free Trade Bulletin published by the Cato Institute, Director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies, Dan Griswold argues that the United States

is unnecessarily costing itself millions of dollars and sorely needed goodwill with an overly cautious

visa waiver policy. The study entitled

Expand Visa Waiver Program to qualified countries

makes the case for extending the visa waiver to a handful of nations that pose

no security threat to the United States but whose tourists are

discouraged by our prohibitive visa process.

What's wrong with the visa waiver program that we have in place today?

Well really there's nothing wrong with the program other than it should be extended to more countries.

The Visa Waiver program has been in place for 20 years, and it allows visitors from 27 different countries to come to the United States for up to 90 days

without first obtaining a visa for tourism or business travel.

And these 27 countries, they're basically the countries of Western Europe and Japan and Australia and New Zealand, Singapore.

The problem with the program is there are a number of other countries.

They're called the Roadmap countries that really should be part of the visa waiver program.

They're strong US allies. They have middle to upper income, so there isn't danger of them wanting to come here for jobs.

And these countries are important US allies, like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the

three Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania.

South Korea, the Japanese can come here without a visa, but South Koreans can't explain that policy.

And we're losing out one on tourist dollars, but two on an opportunity to build goodwill

with people around the world by excluding these countries from this program.

You talk about the economic consequences of this program in your study.

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