U.S. cannot track foreign visitors who overstay their visas

The United States still does not have an effective system to verify that foreign visitors have left the country. New York Times’s James McKinley and Julia Preston write that this security loophole was highlighted last week, when Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year-old Jordanian who had overstayed his tourist visa, was accused in court of plotting to blow up a Dallas skyscraper.

Last year alone, 2.9 million foreign visitors on temporary visas like Smadi’s checked in to the country but never officially checked out, immigration officials said. While officials say they have no way to confirm it, they suspect that several hundred thousand of them overstayed their visas.

Mckinley and Preston write that, over all, about 40 percent of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States came on legal visas and overstayed.

Smadi’s case has brought renewed calls from both parties in Congress for DHS officials to complete a universal electronic exit monitoring system.

Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said the Smadi case “points to a real need for an entry and exit system if we are serious about reducing illegal immigration.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-New York), chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, said he would try to steer money from the economic stimulus program to build an exit monitoring system.

Since 9/11, immigration authorities, with more than $1 billion from Congress, have greatly improved and expanded their systems to monitor foreigners when they arrive. Despite several Congressional authorizations, though, there are no biometric inspections or a systematic follow-up to confirm that foreign visitors have departed.

DHS officials say that universal exit monitoring is a daunting and costly goal, mainly because of the U.S.’s long and busy land borders, with more than one million crossings every day. The wrong exit plan, they said, could clog trade, disrupt border cities, and overwhelm immigration agencies with information they could not effectively use.

McKinley and Preston write that since 2004, homeland security officials have put systems in place to check all foreigners as they arrive, whether by air, sea, or land. Customs officers now take fingerprints and digital photographs of visitors from most countries, instantly comparing them against law enforcement watch list databases (Canadians and Mexicans with special border-crossing cards are exempt from these checks).

DHS security officials said, however, that a series of pilot programs since 2004 had failed to yield an exit monitoring system that would work for the whole nation. “They have not yet found technology to support speedy exit inspections at land borders. And airlines balked at an effort last year by the Bush administration to make them responsible for taking fingerprints and photographs of departing foreigners,” McKinley and Preston write.

The current system relies on departing foreigners to turn in a paper stub when they leave.

Last year, official figures show, 39 million foreign travelers were admitted on temporary visas like Smadi’s. Based on the paper stubs, homeland security officials said, they confirmed the departure of 92.5 percent of them. Most of the remaining visitors did depart, officials said, but failed to check out because they did not know how to do so. More than 200,000 of them are believed to have overstayed intentionally.

Immigration authorities have put in place a separate system for keeping track of foreigners who, unlike Smadi, come on student visas. That system has proved effective at confirming that the students have stayed in school and do not overstay their visas, officials said.

McKinley and Preston write that immigration analysts said that given the difficulties of enforcing the U.S.’ vast borders, it remains primarily up to law enforcement officials to thwart terrorism suspects who do not have records that would draw scrutiny before they enter the United States.

“You can’t ask the immigration system to do everything,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a research center in Washington, and a former commissioner of the immigration service. “This is an example of how changes in law enforcement priorities and techniques since Sept. 11 actually got to where they should be.”