Almost half of our millions of illegal immigrants do not sneak unlawfully into the country; they enter legally and overstay their visas. Nearly seven years after 9/11, while we now track who enters, we are still not tracking who leaves. At the Counterterrorism Blog, my buddy Bill West, a former top immigration official, tackles the related issues of visa overstays and the Visa Waiver Program:
In recent days there have been news reports relating to the CIA Director expressing concerns over terrorist operatives emanating from al-Qaeda camps in the Pakistani badlands who are Westerners traveling with European passports, able to enter the United States via the Visa Waiver Program with otherwise “clean’ backgrounds who would not raise suspicions of US security personnel. There is also a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study just out that faults the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) US VISIT alien entry and exit tracking system for being nowhere near ready to implement its departure control structure.
The two supposed immigration control systems, Visa Waiver and US VISIT, are key elements to the nation’s immigration process. Visa Waiver allows citizens of some 27 countries, primarily Western and Northern European nations (but that list is about to be expanded to several East European countries), to enter the US as temporary visitors for 90 days without any visa screening application process outside the United States. The Visa Waiver program was initiated in the 1980s to facilitate international tourism during a time when terrorism and national security were far lower concerns on the border control radar screen.
The US VISIT system captures digital fingerprints, photographs and documentary information of aliens entering the United States at ports of entry and registers them in the immigration database and cross-matches the data against security threat and criminal databases. US VISIT was implemented in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. After much “fine-tuning,” the entry portion of the system is finally working fairly well; however, the departure control half of the system remains problematic. DHS has never quite figured out how to “control” those departures in concert with airlines. Further still, DHS has yet to determine what to do with the huge number of violator leads that will be generated by the system.
A number of reliable studies have revealed 40% or more of the illegal alien population initially entered the US on a nonimmigrant (temporary) visa such as a visitor or student visa and simply overstayed their authorized time period (among other violations). Once the US VISIT departure control system is placed online, it is intended to identify those entrants who are reflected as not having departed within the expiration of their authorized period of stay, if they have not otherwise received a proper extension or some legal change of status. In short order, those violator leads will be very many. Exactly what to do with all those leads becomes problematic for an agency that is already befuddled by its missions and strapped by manpower limitations.