FRANCE: The American dream has soured for an estimated 540,000 French people who do not have the good fortune to possess a computer-readable passport issued between 2001 and October 26th, 2005.
Because of new rules established by the US government - and accepted by 27 "visa waiver" countries, including France - thousands of French people now wait two months for a visa interview, then queue for more than two hours outside the US consular section in the rue Saint Florentin. The telephone call to make the appointment costs €14.50; the visa application €85.
This bureaucratic rigamarole is all the more enraging because French citizens would not need visas if their government could provide them with biometric passports. Ireland, Britain, Germany, Brunei, Slovenia and Singapore are among the "visa waiver" countries which successfully complied with the US deadline.
Last summer, the ministry of the interior issued a bid for tender to produce biometric passports with an embedded digital photograph and fingerprints.
Oberthur - a private firm which has been making biometric passports for Belgium since 2004 - was in the process of winning the contract when trade unionists at the Imprimerie Nationale, the state-owned printer, filed a suit based on a 1993 law which says they alone are authorised to produce identity documents.
The trade unionists say they were protecting their livelihood.
But the Imprimerie Nationale does not have the technology to produce the documents.
Visa applications at the US consulate have quadrupled. "This is the kind of problem you usually encounter in countries like Mali or Mexico," a US diplomat told Le Monde.
The interior ministry has hired 50 people to start producing biometric passports in a workshop outside Paris by May. But there are serious doubts about its ability to meet demand - 3.5 million French passports were issued last year.