U.S. Doesn’t Know How Many Foreign Visitors Overstay Visas
In an article in the New York Times, Ron Nixon reports on the latest fallout of the recent San Bernadino terrorist shootings. One of the shooters, Tashfeen Malik, entered the United States on a fiancé visa. In response to the events, Congress has looked more generally at U.S. visa procedures.
In recent testimony before Congress, it became clear that the Obama administration could not be certain about the number of noncitizens who overstayed their visas every year. The problem is that many years ago Congress passed a law requiring the federal government to develop a system to track people who overstayed their visas. After the events of September 11, 2001, an entry and exit tracking system was seen as a vital national security and counterterrorism tool, and the 9/11 Commission recommended that the Department of Homeland Security complete a system “as soon as possible.” Two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Satam al-Suqami and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had overstayed their visas.
Since then, the federal government has spent millions of dollars on the effort, yet officials can only roughly estimate the number of people in the United States illegally after overstaying visas.
KJ