Illegal Aliens - Nonimmigrant Overstays

An April 2002 report from the U.S. Department of Justice (Follow-Up Report on INS Efforts to Improve the Control of Nonimmigrant Overstays, Report no. I-2002-006, Washington, DC, April 2002) stated:

Data from the 2000 Census suggests the number [of overstays] may be at least 8 million. Scholars at Boston's Northeastern University estimated the number as close to 13 million in a February 2001 study, An Analysis of the Preliminary 2000 Census Estimates of the Resident Population of the U.S. and Their Implications for Demographic, Immigration, and Labor Market Analysis and Policymaking. The common perception that the vast majority of illegal aliens entered the United States by surreptitiously crossing the southwest or northern border is inaccurate. INS officials have testified before Congress that 40% to 50% of the illegal alien population entered the United States legally as temporary visitors but failed to depart when required. The INS commonly refers to these illegal aliens as nonimmigrant overstays, and according to the INS this population is growing by at least 125,000 a year.

Under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is responsible for collecting documents from incoming travelers, but airlines and shipping lines are responsible for collecting departure forms and for sending those forms to ICE. However, departure forms may have gone unrecorded because they were not collected, they were collected by the airline but not sent to ICE, or the forms were returned to ICE but incorrectly recorded. Therefore, the number of visa overstays is difficult to estimate.

In a May 2004 report to Congress (Overstay Tracking: A Key Component of Homeland Security and a Layered Defense, report to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, GAO-04-82, http://www.gao.gov/htext/d0482.html), the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported the DHS had estimated the number of overstays in the United States to be 2.3 million in 2000. However, the GAO noted this figure did not account for an unknown number of short- and long-term overstays from Mexico and Canada. (See Figure 5.3.) FIGURE 5.3
Key groups covered and not covered by DHS's overstay estimate
SOURCE: "Figure 3. Key Groups Covered and Not Covered by DHS's Overstay Estimate," in Overstay Tracking: A Key Component of Homeland Security and a Layered Defense, Report to the Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives by U.S. General Accounting Office, May 2004, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0482.pdf (accessed April 6, 2005) Citizens of Canada admitted for up to six months and Mexican citizens with border crossing cards entering at a border in the southwest for a stay of less than seventy-two hours are exempt from the visa admissions procedure. The GAO report also noted weaknesses in the tracking system that identified who entered the country on visas but which did not accurately track when, or if, those individuals left.

In fiscal year (FY) 2001 the INS reported 32,799,000 arrivals at U.S. ports of entry, not including Mexican and Canadian business or pleasure visitors. Of these arrivals, 79% departed before their authorized stay expired and another 1% departed after their initial authorized stay expired. While there were no departure records for 15% of those persons who arrived by air or sea, departure records were missing for nearly three-fourths (71%) of all persons who arrived by land. The document that formed the basis of the tracking system was the Form I-94 completed on arrival. (See Figure 5.4.)