US stops granting visas to Pak nationals following refusal of accepting Pak deportees
The United States (U.S.) has imposed sanctions on Pakistan, after Islamabad refused to take back its citizen deportees and visa over-stayers from U.S.
The U.S. Department of State has said that as of now the consular operations in Pakistan remain unchanged but due to such a sanction mentioned in a Federal Register notification dated April 22, the U.S. may withhold visas of senior Pakistani officials.
Pakistan is the latest country to have been imposed with sanctions under a US law. There are 10 countries under the said list. Out of this, Pakistan and Ghana have been included in 2019. The other 8 countries are Guyana (2001), Gambia (2016), Cambodia (2017), Eritrea (2017), Guinea (2017), Sierra Leone (2017), Burma (2018) and Laos (2018).
Section 243 (d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act provides that upon being notified by the Secretary of Homeland Security that a government of a foreign country denies or unreasonably delays accepting an alien who is a citizen, subject, national, or resident of that country, the Secretary of State shall order consular officers in that foreign country to discontinue granting immigrant visas or non-immigrant visas, or both, to citizens, subjects, nationals, and residents of that country until the Secretary of Homeland Security notifies the Secretary of State that the country has accepted the alien.
A U.S. Department of State’s Spokesperson said, “This is a bilateral issue of ongoing discussion between the US and Pakistani governments and we are not going to get into the specifics at this time.”
Former Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S. – Hussain Haqqani said, “This measure will create hardship for Pakistanis who want or need to travel to the US and could have been avoided if Pakistani authorities had not ignored American requests to respect their legal requirements for deportation. He also added, “Pakistan’s refusal to accept every Pakistani citizen deported from the US is not new. It seems that the US is no longer willing to overlook a wide range of official Pakistani behaviour. Bonhomie has been replaced by sanctions and restrictions based on Islamabad’s policy decisions.”
For the records, there is a law in this regard which came into existence in 1996. However, in the recent past, the lawmakers have been pushing the enforcement of it against countries that refuse to accept deportees and visa over-stayers. While coming to power, the President of U.S. – Donald Trump has clearly said that it will strictly enforce such provisions by denying visas to people from such countries.
