Originally Posted by
seawolf
Have you consider that maybe a legitimate reason is other countries don't want to process pre-clearance from US citizens with reciprocal treatment?
Or as AsiaFlyer suggested, maybe it is a budgetary or privacy control reasons. Perhaps analysis indicate program can not self sustain due to costs involved to send pre-clearance and receive approval/denial etc.
Until you can point to evidence that this is not a reason, accusing CBP of not doing something without a "legitimate reason" is a bit pre-mature in my opinion.
Seawolf,
You may well be right, but IMHO if we are talking about an entity that spends $2 million and takes 2 1/2 years to develop a system whose functionality is simply having a user click a button on an existing website in order to print a plastic card, then IMHO the underlying presumption is that the reasons for doing anything have nothing to do with competence or legitimacy.
Eventually, we'll find out the reasons behind all the this, but at least for now we know directly from the CBP that ABTC framework allows fully participating to provide full pre-clearance benefits to any transitional member whether or not
the transitional member provides similar full pre-clearance benefits.
We also know the laws and regulations in at least some of the participating countries don't distinguish between full and transitional members.
Therefore it is clear that the fact that the U.S. does not seek pre-clearance for it's citizens and the fact that Americans will not get visa exemption has nothing to do with ABTC program itself, but is instead a result of a specific decision by the CBP