Washington, D.C. (June 8, 2022) – Better visa and enforcement policies would have lessened the likelihood that Shihab Ahmed Shihab, an Iraqi who overstayed his visitor's visa, could have worked on a plot to assassinate former President George W. Bush while residing in the country unlawfully.
This is one conclusion from a new Center for Immigration Studies report examining the latest Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Entry/Exit Overstay Report for Fiscal Year 2020, and offering recommendations to address the problem of visa overstays – those foreign visitors who enter legally but fail to leave when they're supposed to.
Overstays account for about 40 percent of the illegal population in the U.S. The new DHS report shows that the total number and rate of overstays increased in 2020, adding to the illegal population, despite international travel being curtailed due to the pandemic. The largest
numbers of visa overstays were from Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, but other countries with smaller numbers had much higher overstay
rates.
Jessica Vaughan, the Center's director of policy studies and author of the report, said, "Visa overstays are a serious national security vulnerability, as well as a significant contribution to the illegal immigration problem. The government agencies that could do something about it – the State Department, ICE, and CBP – prefer to pass the buck rather than take meaningful steps to address this problem, so Congress will have to take the lead."
Vaughan continued, "We need stricter visa standards for problem countries and categories, stricter terms of admission, and more enforcement and consequences for overstaying. We need to complete the biometric entry/exit system for land, sea and air travel. But most of all, we have to address the incentives to overstay; if people can't get a job, a driver's license, or other benefits, and if they think they might be subject to removal, then they will not overstay in such large numbers."
Key findings:
- DHS counted 684,500 overstays in 2020, up very slightly (about 1 percent) from 2019, when 676,400 overstays were counted, and just below the levels in 2016 and 2017.
- Approximately 100,000 of people who overstayed had subsequently departed the United States by the end of the 2020 calendar year, leaving about 567,000 remaining in the country as overstays.
- The most problematic category of visitors for generating overstays is short-term visitors who enter on the standard "B" visa. More than half of all overstays are in this category (353,000 overstays out of 684,500), and these visitors have one of the worst compliance rates of the broad categories identified in the report.
- Student visa compliance improved considerably in 2020. There were nearly 49,000 student visa overstays in 2020, a drop of 39 percent since 2016. The student visa overstay rate declined by 50 percent between 2016 and 2020.
- Approximately 105,000 foreign visitors who entered under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) overstayed in 2020, which is similar to the number in recent years. The United Kingdom had the most VWP overstays, while VWP travelers from Portugal had the worst rate of compliance.
- Compliance in the category that includes temporary workers improved considerably in 2020, with overstays dropping by nearly 30 percent from 2019, the largest drop in any category. This drop was driven primarily by a large decrease in overstays by citizens of India.
