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New York, NY – The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) today released a new report finding that the number of persons overstaying their visas exceeded entries without inspection (EWIs) (e.g., illegal border crossings) for the seventh straight year. From 2016-2017, visa overstayers accounted for 62 percent of the newly undocumented, while 38 percent had crossed a border illegally.
The new report – authored by CMS senior fellow Robert Warren – comes at a time in which the federal government has been shutdown for a record 25 days in an effort by the Trump administration to obtain federal funding for a border wall on the US-Mexico border.
“It is clear from our research that persons who overstay their visas add to the US undocumented population at a higher rate than border crossers. This is not a blip, but a trend which has become the norm, “said Donald Kerwin, CMS’s executive director. “As these numbers indicate, construction of hundreds of more miles of border wall would not address the challenge of irregular migration into our country, far from it.”
The report also found that the undocumented population from Mexico fell by almost 400,000 in 2017 and that, for the first time, the Mexican population constituted less than one-half of the total undocumented population. The undocumented population has dropped by one million since 2010, to under 10.7 million.
“Not only is a wall expensive, it fails to address the issue at hand,” Kerwin concluded. “Our elected leaders in Washington need to reopen the government and begin reforming our broken system in a humane, effective, and balanced manner, including through legalization of DACA recipients and long-term beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status.”
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