Donald Trump’s call for a wall along the whole 2,000-mile
border with Mexico has gotten a lot of immigration hawks excited. I understand
the emotional appeal of his proposal, but it addresses what is actually the
least serious vulnerability in our immigration system. Border infiltrators were
indeed the main type of illegal immigrants for a long time. Estimates dating
from the 1990s were that about 60 percent of the illegal population had jumped
the border. But since then our effort at the border really has improved. While
the number of border agents and the miles and type of fencing are all still
inadequate, not all the money we’ve spent there over the past two decades has
been wasted. Border crossings really are way down. We’re much more able than we
were before to patrol the border effectively, though we have an administration
in Washington that often chooses not to do so, as we’ve seen with the ongoing
surge of Central American teenagers and families into South Texas. But even if
we were to build a wall, and elect a president interested in using it to
protect America’s sovereignty, we’d be missing most of the problem — because
the majority of new illegal aliens are actually visa overstayers. This is the
most important — albeit buried — finding in a paper published this year by the
Center for Migration Studies, an expansionist outfit run by the Scalabrinian
Catholic order that nonetheless does serious work. Co-authored by Robert
Warren, head of statistics for the old INS, the paper finds that the share of overstays
among new illegal aliens has been rising pretty steadily since the 1980s and
surpassed border infiltrators in 2008. The paper’s most recent estimate is for
2012, when nearly 60 percent of new illegal immigrants are believed to have
entered legally on some sort of visa (or visa-waiver status, if they’re from a
developed country) and then just stayed on after their time expired. Share
article on Facebookshare Tweet articletweet An indication of what’s driving
this overstay crisis was highlighted by my colleague David North in a recent
paper. He found a huge increase in the overall number of “non-immigrant” (i.e.,
ostensibly temporary) visas issued by the State Department, and an accompanying
decline in the percentage of applications being denied. In just five years,
from 2009 to 2014, the number of visas issued grew 71 percent, while the
percentage of visa denials dropped from 18.6 percent to 15.3 percent. To top it
off, President Obama’s latest prosecutorial-discretion edict specifying which
illegal aliens are worth bothering with downplays visa overstays. Point (d) in
Priority 2 identifies as worthy of arrest and deportation “aliens who, in the
judgment of an ICE Field Office Director, USCIS District Director, or USCIS
Service Center Director, have significantly abused the visa or visa waiver
programs.” RELATED: Obama Games the Visa System to Lower Wages and Please the
Tech Industry “Significantly abused” is Obama-speak for “ignore them until they
kill someone.” And if that isn’t clear enough, the very next paragraph says
this (the emphasis is mine): These aliens should be removed unless they qualify
for asylum or another form of relief under our laws or, unless, in the judgment
of an ICE Field Office Director, CBP Sector Chief, CBP Director of Field Operations,
USCIS District Director, or [USCIS] Service Center Director, there are factors
indicating the alien is not a threat to national security, border security, or
public safety, and should not therefore be an enforcement priority. To sum up:
We’ve watered down the standards to get a visa, we’ve hugely increased the
number of foreigners we issue visas to, and we don’t bother to arrest or deport
people who overstay those visas. Is it any surprise, then, that of the 1,000
illegal aliens who settle here each day, the majority are visa overstays? More
Immigration Obama Games the Visa System to Lower Wages and Please the Tech
Industry Readin’, Ritin’, ’Rithmetic — After Waves of Immigration, Millions of
Americans Lack Basic Skills Trouble in Paradise We still don’t have a check-out
system for foreign visitors to enable us to identify these illegal-alien
overstays, despite the fact that Congress has mandated it eight times. (Heck,
we don’t even send a text message to foreign visitors alerting them that their
allotted time in the U.S. is about to expire, something that would cut down on
overstays at almost no cost.) Until we have a visa-tracking system in place, we
can’t even pretend to be serious about immigration control. Because of the
corporate/libertarian/ethnic-chauvinist opposition to immigration enforcement,
it took years of steady, unrelenting political pressure to get improvements at
the border. The same commitment to fight the anti-borders crowd will be needed
to force implementation of an effective visa-tracking system. Unfortunately,
bloviating about making the Mexicans pay for a wall distracts us from that
task. — Mark Krikorian has served as executive director of the Center for
Immigration Studies since 1995.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424879/visa-overstays-todays-immigration-crisis-mark-krikorian
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