In 1996, Lamar Smith wrote a bill – signed into law by President Bill Clinton – requiring the federal government to create a system to track both the entry and exit of foreign visitors. Thirteen years later, it's still a work in progress.
The Homeland Security Department has been building a system called U.S.-VISIT for several years.
The system compares biometric data with security databases, mostly to ensure that a foreigner arriving at a U.S. airport or land crossing isn't using someone else's passport. The data is stored. But, since most ports of entry don't identify departing foreigners, it's almost useless for tracking how many people – let alone which individuals – stayed longer than they were supposed to.
Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, don't dispute that.
Four of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had overstayed their visas, and that issue has vexed policymakers and informed the nation's immigration debate for years.
Immigrant advocates agree that relatively little effort is expended to track down people who overstay their visas.
The immigration department has a National Fugitive Operations Program that tracks down foreigners who arrived without permission, and also those who arrived legally but stayed longer than their visas allowed. The top priority is to find people who pose a threat to public safety – people with known terrorist links or criminal records, or active arrest warrants.
The immigration agency posts a list of 15 "most-wanted criminal aliens." Not one is wanted for an act of terrorism. Most are accused of human smuggling or lewd acts involving children.
After Sept. 11, the government required males age 16 to 70 from a number of countries, most of them predominantly Muslim, to report their whereabouts. The backlash was intense, and the program was largely abandoned.
Washington is spending about $300 million per year implementing US-VISIT (the acronym stands for Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology).
Napolitano's predecessor in the Bush administration, Michael Chertoff, estimated that up to 40 percent of the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants had earned that status by overstaying their visas.
"We are at the same place we were before 9/11," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates immigration restriction. "There's been some but not much progress."
Why the contribution is important
Like millions of others classified by the government as illegal immigrants, the Jordanian teen accused of plotting to blow up a Dallas office tower last week arrived in the United States legally and stayed long after his visa expired.
Federal immigration officials said Tuesday that Hosam Smadi, 19, arrived on a visitor visa, not a student visa as initially believed, in spring 2007.
The difference is crucial: For foreign students, dropping out of school triggers a report to a central database and, often, a follow-up by immigration authorities. For those who arrive as tourists or workers, it's almost certain authorities won't take notice unless they apply for a driver's license, get pulled over or arrested or call attention to themselves. Many times these incidents merely result in the offender being released. The DHS may refuse to put them on an immigration hold or pick them up.
Corrective measure must be taken to eliminate this huge gap in our security.
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The United States has always welcomed refugees and Legal immigrants; the problem in the United States has to do with ILLEGALS invading our nation and student or other visa holders who over stay their visa with out any genuine desire to assimilate as citizens but some only obtain citizenship in an effort to steal from our treasury and take jobs from citizens sending their ill gotten gains back to their home countries while planning their return or the others who want to destroy the United States by terrorism.
I would certainly like to see more done with this. This will not stop illegal crossings of immigrants, but it certainly gives us a group of people to look into further for deviating from their visits. It is a huge problem that the individuals pointed out in your idea were never apprehended or made to leave the country when their travel documents had run out. We have to do better in this area if the goal is truly to protect the American people.