Visa Overstays a Bigger Immigration Crisis Than Mexico Border

Visa overstays have a more significant impact on immigration than illegal border crossings, The Atlantic reports.

Robert Warren, the former director of the statistics division of Immigration and Naturalization Service, which later became U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and currently a senior visiting fellow at the Center for Migration Studies, found that visa overstays outnumber border crossings by a 2 to 1 margin.

The Atlantic notes that visa overstays have outnumbered illegal border crossings every year for the past seven years. The Center for Migration Studies found in a report that about 515,000 people arrived in this country illegally in 2016, and that about three-fifths, or 320,000, overstayed their visas, while the rest entered by illegally crossing the border. The Atlantic notes that this number is a small fraction of the over 50 million people who legally enter the U.S. with valid visas.

Despite this, Warren notes that immigration critics continue to focus on immigrants who cross the border illegally rather than focusing on the bigger problem of people overstaying their visas.

“It’s right out there in the news, and you can see people” crossing borders, Warren told the Atlantic. “With the overstayers, people will be tourists and they’ll come here, and they’ll either join relatives or they’ll join people they know, and they’ll get a job, and they’re not visible.”