Money quote(s):
"Sanctions have been triggered only twice before — once in 2001 against Guyana and again late last year against Gambia. In both instances, they produced quick results. Guyana moved within months to issue travel documents to take back 112 of the 113 deportees stuck in a backlog."
Limiting the ability of foreign officials and their families' ability to visit the U.S. is what CAA likes to call "The Miami Sanction."
For much of Central America and the Caribbean, Miami provides Third World countries with a First World "capital city." It's where they send their wives to shop and their kids to school. Los Angeles and New York City fill similar roles for different regions as London and Paris do for much of the developing world in that hemisphere. There are direct air-links to those cities from many Third World countries.
The "Miami Sanction" puts an exquisite pressure on foreign government officials.
"State Department officials said the sanctions begin Wednesday, halting issuance of at least some categories of visas to would-be travelers from Cambodia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Eritrea.
“The Secretary of State has ordered consular officers in Eritrea, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia to implement visa restrictions effective September 13, 2017,” the department said in a statement provided to The Washington Times. “The Secretary determined the categories of visa applicants subject to these restrictions on a country-by-country basis.”
The law allows for all visas to be halted to any country that refuses cooperation, but the department decided to impose less-draconian penalties in each of the four cases.
In Cambodia, only top diplomats and their families will be denied temporary tourism or business visas. In Eritrea, the U.S. Embassy will stop issuing business and tourist visas to all citizens.
In Guinea, government officials and family members will be denied business, tourist, and student and exchange program visas. In Sierra Leone, the government’s diplomats and immigration officials will be denied business and tourist visas."Interestingly, the visa sanctions against the four countries show a graduated, even nuanced, set of penalties:
Eritrea - no B1/B2 visas for anyone, no how, no way;
Guinea - no B1/B2, F, or J visas for government officials and their families;
Sierra Leone - no B1/B2 visas for either diplomats or immigration officials;
Cambodia - no B1B2 visas for top diplomats and their families.
(CAA would love to know what factors resulted in this range of sanctions, but it's the kind of inside-baseball that only comes to light decades later in some diplomat's small-batch memoir.)
