01/26/2016
Last week the Senate Immigration Subcommittee held a hearing on temporary visas for vacations and such being abused when users never go home. It’s a great scheme for lawbreakers, since the administration makes no effort to deport them. Senator Sessions has published a summary of the hearing’s findings, posted below.
Isn’t an airplane ticket to Dallas less expensive than hiring a criminal coyote who might leave clients to die in the border desert? Are the stories of visa overstays not reported in Mexico to protect the incomes of people smugglers? It’s odd that millions more don’t invade this way.
Remember that an entry-exit visa system was a core recommendation of the 9/11 Commission for national security. Nevertheless, the government will spend billions of dollars on wasteful crap, but refuses to get serious about borders and safety.
Another example of visa overstayers are foreign students who drop out of their US college yet remain as residents. Two examples are the Kazakh students Azamat Tazhayakov (left) and Dias Kadyrbayev (middle) who hid evidence implicating their pal the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (right), pictured with him during a visit (or scouting mission) to New York’s Times Square.
Senator Sessions noted the lawlessness condoned by the administration in his opening statement for the hearing, titled Why is the Biometric Exit Tracking System Still Not in Place?
Following is the Sessions summary. You can also read less dense articles like 99 percent of illegal immigrants who overstay visas aren’t investigated (Washington Times, Jan 20) and Sen. Sessions: Visa Overstays Reveal ‘National Immigration Crisis,’ Open Border (Breitbart, Jan 20).
Summary of Key Findings from Subcommittee Hearing on Visa Overstay Crisis: ’Temporary’ Visa Has Become Permanent, January 25, 2016WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, released the following summary of Subcommittee findings from last week’s hearing on the visa overstay crisis and the Administration’s open-borders policy of not deporting temporary visitors and workers who illegally remain in the country:
- The overstay report issued last week — which only addressed temporary nonimmigrant visitors for business or pleasure for one fiscal year — revealed that 527,127 of these individuals overstayed their visas or periods of unauthorized stay in FY 2015. At the end of the fiscal year, 482,781 of these individuals were still in the United States, including 219 individuals from Afghanistan, 564 from Iran, 681 from Iraq, 56 from Libya, 1,435 from Pakistan, 440 from Syria, and 219 from Yemen. And the report contained similar numbers from FY 2014.
- The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it removed only 2,500 individuals in FY2015 for overstaying a visa without a separate criminal conviction.
- The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it had ongoing investigations against only 3,000 visa overstays out of an estimated population of roughly 6,000,000 currently in the United States, or .05% of visa overstays — confirming that visa overstays are not treated as a deportable offense by this Administration.
- The effect of the Administration’s noncompliance with visa laws is that the ‘temporary visa’ has become yet another vehicle for completely circumventing annual permanent immigration caps, with the departure date treated as entirely optional: if you overstay your visa, you will virtually never face deportation as a result. It is a backdoor program to massively expand the foreign-born population of the United States by transforming a temporary visa into a permanent one — circumventing the already very high green card caps.
- Because several temporary visa programs are uncapped, this backdoor immigration program is therefore “uncapped” too.
- To track visa overstays and enhance compliance with our immigration laws, Congress has required the implementation of an automated entry-exit tracking system since 1996, and that the system be biometrically-based since 2004. However, the exit component of the system — a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission — is still not in place today.
- The Department acknowledged that there are no technological obstacles to implementing a biometric exit system yet the Department also confirmed that, over a decade after Congress required implementation of a biometric exit tracking system, it does not even have a goal date for implementation.
Thus, despite Congress recently providing hundreds of millions of dollars for a biometric system, it is clear that a biometric exit system will not be established at all ports of exit unless Congress takes further action to force compliance. Additionally, Congress must work to stiffen penalties for overstaying visas if it is to close this open border.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.