| The estimated official count of immigrants who had entered and remain illegally in the US until 2019 was 11,047,000, according to figures from the Migration Policy Institute. In January 2022, the Center for Immigration Studies put this number at 11,460,000. There are no more recent figures; only estimates which can be very inaccurate. However, according to NBC, a medium that usually defends the undocumented, in the fiscal year of 2022 it is estimated that 2,760,000 foreigners crossed the southern border illegally. And nearly a million more stayed in the US after entering legally with a tourist or a working visa. As of May 2023, the fiscal burden of providing essential services and benefits to illegal aliens costs American taxpayers nearly $151 billion each year. |
United States: Record 853,955 Foreigners Overstay Legal Visas in Fiscal Year 2022
June 30.– More than two decades after Islamic terrorists exploited the U.S. government’s inefficient system for tracking foreigners who overstay visas, the problem is only getting worse with a startling 853,955 visa overstays in fiscal year 2022. A new report issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tries to downplay the severity of the situation by shining a light on the positive, that the overstay rate is a mere 3.67% compared to 96.33% of over 23 million nonimmigrants that departed the country on time in accordance with the terms of their admission.
The reality is that the latest available overstay figure is an alarming record-breaker for the U.S. and it indicates that national security is not being taken seriously by the government. At least four of the September 11 hijackers were in the United States with expired visas and all these years later the government—under both Democratic and Republican administrations—has not found a way to track visa overstayers adequately.
After the 9/11 attacks, Congress created a system to track the entry and exit of foreign nationals by using electronically scanned fingerprints and photographs. It was called the U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology (US VISIT) and it was seriously flawed even though the government invested around a billion dollars over several years to get it going. It never worked properly, however.
In the meantime, a persistent crisis involving visa overstays has gripped the nation in the years following the 2001 attacks. The investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that nearly half of the nation’s illegal aliens entered the U.S. legally and overstayed their visa undetected. Other federal investigations have revealed that the U.S. has failed to properly remove millions who overstayed their visa, including DHS losing track of hundreds of dangerous foreigners that “could pose a national security or public safety concerns.”
Every year the government fails to catch hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals who overstay their visa. In fiscal year 2015, it was more than half a million, including thousands from terrorist nations like Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria. A few years later the number of visa overstayers increased to 702,000. Among them was a Portuguese man with an expired visa charged in the gruesome kidnap and murder of a young woman whose body was found bound in a suitcase on a Connecticut street.
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