Canadians top list of visitors who illegally overstay visas

The number of foreigners who were supposed to leave the United States during a recent 12month period but overstayed their visas dropped slightly, the Homeland Security Department reported last week.

Despite President Trump’s focus on immigrants from Mexico, for the second straight year Canada occupied the top spot for overstays followed by Mexico, Venezuela, the United Kingdom and Colombia, according to the 43-page report.

The report shows that a total of 701,900 people whose visas expired during the year ending last Sept. 30 overstayed their permissions, counting only foreigners who entered by air and seaports.

California has the largest number of overstays (890,000), followed by New York (520,000), Texas (475,000), and Florida (435,000), according to an estimate from the Center for Migration Studies, a think tank based in New York, compiled from 2014 and 2015 figures.

An overstay is defined by DHS as a nonimmigrant who was lawfully admitted to the United States for an authorized period but stayed in the United States beyond his or her authorized admission period.

Overall, the fiscal 2017 “overstay rates are lower than those presented in the previous year’s” report, DHS stated. From October 2015 through September 2016 there were 739,478 overstays among visitors who arrived by plane or ship — a roughly 38,000 drop in overstays.

The total number of overstays in 2017 represents only 1.3 percent of the 52.7 million visi-

tors who came to the U.S. by air and seaport with the expected departure that year. They entered with nonimmigrant admissions, such as for business or pleasure with B1 and B2 visas, students and exchange students with certain visas and other permissions, according to the DHS report.

Students and exchange visitors are the group with the highest rate of overstays, with 4.15 percent of a total 1,662,369 scheduled to complete their program but staying beyond their authorization.

To tackle this kind of illegal immigration arising from authorized entrances, the DHS has accelerated the ability for the government to track and enforce visitors’ exits with positive results, said John P. Wagner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

“Besides gradually implementing facial recognition and biometric exit components at airports, we are being clear with people and advising them of their obligation to leave on time,” Wagner said. For instance, “we have been sending email notifications to people when their expected date of departure is coming up. And if we don’t have a recorded departure of them, we are sending follow up emails about their overstay.”

The George Bush Intercontinental in Houston is one of the airports where CBP installed facial biometric exit technology last year, which is in use to track some flights on a trial basis, pending a decision to expand the software’s use across the airport.

Another initiative implemented by CBP: A “Traveler Compliance Check” webpage within the DHS website where foreigners with nonimmigrant visas can look up what their period of admission is and when it expires so they can verify their expected departure date, among other tools.

Stricter enforcement

CBP said it is also enforcing sanctions for foreigners staying beyond their permissions, such as suspensions of further entrances for long periods of time or altogether, among others, depending on the severity of the case.

As a result, “overall, what we have seen is that, although the volume of travelers has increased, we had a slight decrease in the percentage of overstays in the different categories from year to year.”

The rate of total overstays fell to 1.3 percent from 1.5 in the previous fiscal year of 2016, at the same period that the country was receiving 4.8 percent more travelers at airports.

However, more telling about the increase in enforcement is the difference between total overstays and what the DHS calls “suspected in-country overstays.” The first category counts foreigners who didn’t leave by the visa expiration date, of whom a few have been tracked departing at a later time by air or seaports. The other refers to visitors with no record of having left the country at all.

CBP reports there has been a significant decline in the number of suspected overstays that were counted at the end of fiscal year 2016. By May 1, 2018, that figure was reduced from 629,000 to 340,000, rendering a rate of only 0.67 percent of overstays still remaining in the U.S.

Contrary to popular belief and political rhetoric that vilify Mexicans and other communities as the culprit of most immigration violations, when it comes to people who illegally overstay their visas — many of whom become undocumented immigrants — the crown belongs to Canadians.

Canada, by far, is at the top of the list of countries whose nationals remain in the U.S. after their permit expirations, with a total of 101,281 visitors doing so last year. Mexico follows, but with almost half the number of Canadians for a total of 52,859. Although the rate of Canadian overstays is lower than Mexicans’ at 1.10 to 1.81 percent, respectively, the gross impact of Canadians on this kind of unauthorized population is much higher.

“People are not used to thinking of Canadians as the ‘bad guys,’” said Néstor Rodríguez, a sociology professor of the University of Texas at Austin who researches immigration. “Particularly now, when Mexicans are being subjected to a negative social construction by the administration, where they are criminalized and seen as rapists and thieves, everybody can be surprised by this fact (about overstays) because it doesn’t fit the rhetoric,” he added.

‘Preferential treatment’

The number of undocumented Canadians now living in the U.S. is unknown.

“I am surprised that there is even such a report tracking Canadians,” said Gordon Quan, an immigration attorney in Houston. “For many years, Canadians have just had to show their passport and just get a ‘welcome to the United States,’ so only now we are beginning to know how many of them” have overstayed, he said.

“Unauthorized Europeans and Canadians have long received preferential treatment in U.S. politics and sometimes in policy,” said David FitzGerald, professor and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

FitzGerald said numerous studies have shown immigration enforcement disproportionally targets Latino men. Several factors contribute to that, including that the border with Canada, much more extensive and porous than the southern border, had been largely neglected by administrations and Congress for fund allocations, something that began to change after 9/11.

But a race as a factor cannot be ignored, he said.

“Canadians pass for Americans” in terms of look, and “who stops these (white) people asking for their papers?” Quan said.