DHS Defends Visa-Free Travel for Chinese Nationals to ‘Frontline’ Pacific-Island U.S. Territory

The Department of Homeland Security is defending a policy that allows Chinese nationals to travel visa-free to a militarily strategic U.S. island chain in the Pacific Ocean, National Review has exclusively learned.

DHS revealed its decision to maintain the policy in a letter to Senator Joni Ernst and Representative Neal Dunn this week. That disclosure followed a monthslong effort by the lawmakers to investigate the possible security vulnerability in facilitating Chinese access to the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI), an unincorporated commonwealth territory of the U.S.

They worry that the policy could allow visa-less Chinese citizens to travel onward from those islands to Guam, a separate U.S. territory, to carry out surveillance and sabotage operations against military facilities there.

“The Chinese Communist party has already proven they will stop at nothing to infiltrate the United States, and that threat is increasing every day as Chinese nationals use a visa loophole to gain access to our critical military installations in Guam,” Ernst told National Review in a statement.

Dunn told NR that DHS should change the current 14-day visa-free entry for Chinese nationals to a visitor visa requirement: “Law enforcement does an outstanding job capturing those with ill-intent, but look how DHS handles our border crisis. We cannot risk the same thing occurring in the CMNI.”

The CNMI is a “frontline” territory for the U.S., as it stares down a Chinese political offensive in the Pacific islands, Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said.

Chinese nationals traveling to Guam — which is separate from CNMI but shares a maritime border with it — and U.S. states have to go through border controls upon entering those destinations, but the visa-free policy means that they can more easily enter the Northern Marianas.

From the southernmost island in the CNMI, Guam —t he home to sensitive military facilities that would be targeted at the start of a war with China — is merely 60 to 80 miles away.

Ernst and Dunn initially wrote to DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to express concern about the policy in November, following a spate of incidents in which Chinese citizens traveled illegally from CNMI to Guam by boat.

She slammed the Biden administration for waiting four months to answer inquiries that she and Dunn had lodged and for defending an “outdated policy.”

In a response to the November 30 letter sent on April 1, Zephranie Buetow, DHS assistant secretary for legislative affairs wrote that the policy remains in place because the CNMI derive economic benefits from Chinese tourists.

The visa-free policy is rooted in a 2008 law that established visa-free travel for nationals from countries whose tourism would grant a “significant economic benefit,” the official wrote.

“The Department determined the People’s Republic of China (PRC) met this economic threshold,” Buetow wrote.

She added that people without a visa “are not authorized to trave to other parts of the United States, including Guam” and that U.S. Customs and Border Protection at CNMI airports will prevent them from traveling on to those other destinations.

DHS did not respond to a request for comment about its decision to maintain the visa-free policy.

But some, including CNMI leaders, don’t necessarily agree with DHS’s assessment that Chinese economic activity continues to boost the territory’s economy.

CNMI governor Arnold Palacios said during an event at FDD’s office in Washington in February that he has begun a “pivot away from Chinese investment and even Chinese tourism,” citing the instability of Chinese investments and the broader U.S.-China relationship.

“I have no idea why DHS is defending the policy,” Paskal, an expert on the Pacific islands whose most recent visit to the CNMI was last year, said in an interview today. She said that compared with the economic situation when the policy was introduced, CNMI derives little economic benefit from visa-free Chinese tourism today.

Paskal also pointed to DHS’s removal of Russia from the visa-waiver policy in 2019.

“If you at some point made the decision that maybe it wasn’t great to have Russians wandering around like that, why do you need the Chinese in place?”

She also pointed to evident Chinese interest in Guam’s military installations, including recently-revealed Chinese cyber-operations that included the placement of malware in the island’s critical infrastructure. Beijing, she said, is interested in impeding Guam’s response to a potential future Chinese invasion of Taiwan, either through missile strikes or other operations.

“In order to accomplish those goals on Guam, it helps to have untraceable operatives on the ground,” Paskal said.

Ernst accused DHS of “putting our military secrets at risk” and said, “We must change this visa policy and put an end to Chinese nationals accessing our military installations on U.S. territories for any malign activity.”