Federal rules change will aid foreign travelers to Las Vegas

Jace Radke and Benjamin Grove

Thursday, Feb. 20, 2003 | 11:18 a.m.

A change in federal rules will soon make it more convenient for some international tourists to include Las Vegas in their travel plans.

On March 3 McCarran International Airport and Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport are scheduled to become designated "ports of departure" for visitors who are required to slog through the bureaucratic process of registering their arrivals and departures under post-Sept. 11 terrorist-watch rules.

The change means that special-registration visitors will not have to make an additional trip to Los Angeles or another airport when they want to visit Nevada.

"Las Vegas is a big international destination, so we were hoping that this would happen sooner rather than later," said Karen Dorman, special agent in charge of the Las Vegas INS office. The INS is part of the Department of Justice.

It's not known exactly how many registration-required visitors will find Las Vegas a more convenient destination after the rule change, or how much money those tourists pump into the Las Vegas economy.

Erika Brandvik, a spokeswoman with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said that the five countries on the watch list are not really advertising targets of the tourism industry. But she added that the rule change might make Nevada a more convenient destination for big-spending gamblers from nations like Saudi Arabia who are required to register.

Nevada lawmakers sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft last week requesting that the rule change be expedited, unaware that the change was already imminent.

Aides to Nevada lawmakers said the rule change does not make it more convenient for unsavory characters to make Las Vegas part of their trip. They said screening processes in the airports where foreigners depart -- as well as in the U.S. airports where foreigners arrive, including McCarran -- are designed to alert authorities of anyone who could possibly be a threat.

Currently visitors from five nations on an Immigration and Naturalization Service state-sponsored terrorism list -- Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria and Lybia -- are required to register when they arrive in the United States, as part of the INS National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. Other visitors from any foreign nation identified by U.S. inspectors as meeting criteria on a federal terror-watch list also must register. The government has not released what criteria it uses to screen for terrorists.

The process takes about 20 minutes, INS officials say, and includes collecting fingerprints, taking photographs and documenting the purpose for the trip, as well as contact information.

The visitors can fly into Las Vegas and register at McCarran. But under current rules, the travelers cannot register their departure at McCarran. Instead they must fly to one of 20 departure port airports such as Los Angeles International Airport.

Only those airports are currently set up to put travelers through that exit-registration process. But on March 3, McCarran, Sky Harbor and a number of other airports nationwide will join that list.

All international flights from countries on the INS special registration list land and depart at McCarran's Terminal 2, where U.S. Customs and INS agents are stationed, Dorman said.