So says a scathing report in The Washington Times here which says the General Accounting Office can somehow do an audit and find out that we've got 1 million overstaying visas right now, or that previously the number was 1.6 million, but the executive branch hasn't ever been able to figure it out in any year in two decades, nor has Homeland Security fulfilled its legal obligation to track exit compliance since 2004.
Maybe it's because presidents don't give a damn? Maybe it's because there's an unspoken agreement between the two parties to keep the flow coming despite what the people want? Because businesses want the cheap labor, and politicians want the extra votes? And oops, some terrorists get in, so sorry, so now we have to spy on everybody to fix that?
Excerpts:
"The GAO said most of the overstays came by airplane, but 32 percent came through land ports of entry, and 4 percent came by sea. The average length of overstay was 2.7 years. ... The executive branch is supposed to report annually to Congress on how many people have overstayed their visas but has failed to do so for the past two decades, saying the information isn’t reliable enough. ... The total of 1 million potential overstays in the country is an improvement from two years ago, when the GAO found Homeland Security had lost track of 1.6 million people. Homeland Security went back and looked at those names and found that more than half had either actually left the country unbeknownst to the government, or had gained legal status that allowed them to remain in the U.S. Of the others, the department decided most were deemed not to be security risks and so there was no need to track them down. But 1,901 of them were deemed significant national security or public safety threats, and 266 of those were still unaccounted for as of March."
