DHS & US VISIT...Additional Comment

By Bill West

I have a few follow-up comments to my colleague Mike Cutler’s excellent posting below about the plan by DHS to abandon efforts to implement the departure control provisions of the US VISIT entry/exit border security system. Mike and I have written about this issue previously and have noted the regrettable delay in the development process of the US VISIT departure control system. Knowing who comes into the US on a supposedly temporary visa is one thing; knowing who among that alien population does and does not leave when they are required is another. The national security ramifications of such matters are self-evident.

DHS officials have cited technological and cost issues as the primary reasons for abandoning this effort, followed by concerns for the potential disruption to the flow of legitimate international travel and commerce. When hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on the war in Iraq, one wonders how a few billion over several years securing America’s borders can be considered poorly spent if the results truly work. From a technological perspective, the entry part of US VISIT is handled by an Inspector physically examining the person and documents as they enter the country at the port-of-entry and inputting the requisite information into a database. Perhaps until higher workable technology is developed, having Inspectors physically examine persons and documents as they depart the US at ports-of-entry might work. Of course, this might require hiring more Inspectors and building additional inspection facilities at the ports. Perhaps that might have been what Congress had in mind when it appropriated all that additional funding to the program instead of farming it out to an offshore contracting firm?

Notwithstanding the reasons (excuses?) given by DHS officials for giving up on this critical national security program, I would suggest another reason for this may be that senior Government officials really don’t want to know how many non-immigrant alien entrants, those who come on those “temporary” visas, really don’t leave. Studies have indicated as much as 40% of the illegal alien population comes from those. If the US VISIT departure control system worked the way it is supposed to work, presumably it would electronically report a very large number of non-departures by alien entrants who were supposed to leave.

If US VISIT fully worked, there would be solid, quantified evidence of something most experienced observers suspected all along...that our temporary visa entry system is widely abused as a method of illegal immigration. Additionally, DHS would be faced with the dilemma of what to do with the specific information its own system reported on suspected and known violators, particularly when that system would report violators in huge and overwhelming numbers. There would surely be questions about such matters. Who among the suspected violators are being pursued for further investigation and arrest? If so, why? If not, why? What triage criteria is used to identify violators for further action? What are the numbers in any particular time frame? Congress, GAO, the OIG, the media...they would all want answers to very difficult questions and, in reality, given the limited manpower resources and still yet-to-be-fully-determined mission functions of DHS’ immigration agencies, not very much would be getting done in any follow-up enforcement action.

Are these reasons to have abandoned departure control in US VISIT? Of course not. This action, as Mike Cutler has described, is merely reflective of bureaucratic surrender.

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