United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has on Tuesday expressed hope that President Donald Trump’s administration may be able to lift visa restrictions placed on Nigeria last week.
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During a meeting with Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, Pompeo said the restrictions were imposed on Nigeria and five other countries because the United States Government wanted them to do more to ascertain the information on travelers.
Eritrea, Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan are the other countries affected by this new policy expected to take effect from February 21.
Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, had last week said;
The new immigration restrictions were designed to address security concerns in the way the banned countries track their own citizens, share information with the U.S. and cooperate on immigration matters.
However, the new restriction would apply only to new visa applications as immigrants issued valid visas before that date will still be able to move to the US.
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Secretary of State added that President Trump took the action partly due to the “terrorist threat” in West Africa, where Nigeria has fought alongside the United States against Islamist extremists.
Pompeo told newsmen that Nigeria remains a strategic partner but Trump restricted visas as it has room to grow in sharing important national security information
On his part, Onyeama said Trump’s move caught Nigeria off-guard as they were somewhat blindsided by the announcement of the visa restrictions.
He expressed that Nigeria had already been looking to address US concerns, such as providing information on suspected terrorists and embedding electronic data into passports.
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The lingering problem, he said, involved how to handle lost and stolen Nigerian passports.
He said Nigeria was putting in place a system that would make data from such passports “immediately available” to all members of Interpol, the global law enforcement body, adding that;
We hope to have that up and running very soon. Hopefully, once that has been achieved, we look forward to being taken off this visa restriction list.
It would be recalled that President Trump came to office vowing to impose border restrictions on African and other developing nations that send immigrants to the United States.
