National security is important, you don’t want to let sketchy people into your country. This is somewhat easy to determine for people applying for permanent visas. They have to provide a lot of information and the number of applicants are fairly small, well in comparison to the number of holiday visitors.
I imagine there is a process is a lot harder when the numbers skyrocket. I would think the process would be easier if all the information submitted was accurate. I guess the department of homeland security in the USA doesn’t feel the same way.
Most of the information you need to provide is fairly tame. Essentially the following.
- who are you
- where do you live
- some personal details (passport #)
- what do you do
- where do you work
This information is entered and sometimes the character sets are the same as for the US, but in order to automate the process you would want computers to do all the work. There are at least 31 countries that have diacritics or special characters that are not representable by the Latin character set used by the US.
I know this because if you try and enter a German or French special character the US ESTA site points out that these are illegal names. You are then required to either misspell the name(s) so they are not rejected or the US needs to know all of the substitutions (ie ΓΌ = ue)
Either they like making things harder for themselves or perhaps they are not effectively checking out their tourist visitors.
