For some time now, Congress has been demanding a report on the number of foreign visitors who overstay their visas and thereby become illegal aliens. This matters because an estimated 40 percent of the illegal population is made up of overstays rather than border infiltrators. (And it’s estimated that up to 60 percent of new illegal aliens are overstays.)
The Obama administration has long suppressed this information, for transparently political reasons. But Congress showed evidence of at least one vertebra when it included in last month’s omnibus spending bill a cutoff of $13 million in funds to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson’s office if an overstay report was not issued by January 19.
The report was released yesterday.
It shows that nearly half a million foreign visitors who were supposed to return home last year had failed to do so by the end of the year. And the report looked only at a subset of the problem: arrivals by air and sea of people with B1/B2 visas (tourists and business travelers), Visa Waiver visitors (generally from developed countries), and those who flew or came by sea from Canada or Mexico. Not examined were the three-quarters of lawful entries by foreigners that happen at the land borders, as well as people coming with other types of visas, such as for students or guestworkers, that are known to also have significant overstay rates.
As my colleague Jessica Vaughan points out, the report understates the rate of visa overstays by counting the number of entries by foreigners rather than the number of individual foreigners arriving. In other words, if 10 foreigners each come and go three times, properly, during the course of the year, but another one person overstays on his first visit, that means only one in 31 admissions results in an overstay. But looking at individuals, one in 11 people granted a visa would overstay – roughly triple the rate. In a sense, counting entries highlights the failures of DHS (which manages crossings at the borders), while counting individuals highlights the failures of the State Department (which issues visas to individuals).
(Oh, and 12,000 of the overstays last year came from countries associated with terrorism. But I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.)
One of the keys to getting the overstay problem under control is a biometric exit-tracking system for foreign visitors. (This report was prepared by matching arrival and departure records after the fact.) The Senate immigration subcommittee will hold a hearing this afternoon on why, 14 years after 9/11, the congressionally mandated system for tracking the departure of foreign visitors is still not in place. Watching the three DHS officials who will be in the hot seat should be almost as entertaining as watching another DHS official squirm cluelessly during a House hearing last month.
Half-Million Visa Overstays in 2015