US Department Of Homeland Security To Employ Visa Overstay Tracking Software In 2018, As Per President Trump’s Executive Order

As early as 2018 the Department of Homeland Security will start using computer system to track visa overstays in the United States. The implementation of this system was delayed by the previous administration.

This is long overdue.

Visa overstays are the number one cause of illegal immigration in the United States. Out of the 53 million people who entered the US last year for temporary stays, 730,000 of them never left.

Now that’s a pretty low rate, but given the sheer amount of people that enter the US annually, this causes huge long term problems if that many people are staying annually. In fact, about 40% of all the illegal immigrants currently residing in the US are visa overstays.

We’ve written ad nauseum about why illegal immigration is bad for America (and everywhere else, mind you), not least of all because illegal immigration costs America close to $150 billion a year—this money is obviously better spent on helping our vets, and improving our collapsing infrastructure.

Fixing illegal immigration should be a bipartisan issue, but for some reason it isn’t (perhaps because illegals vote overwhelmingly for Democrats).

In any event, the Trump administration seems to recognize and understand the problem of illegal immigration. The wall is a great start, because the porous southern border is a huge problem. But tracking the visa overstays would seal the deal.

According to John Wagner, the deputy executive assistant commissioner of the US Customs and Border Protection, they expect to roll out this new visa tracking system in major US airports by early 2018.

At a Senate hearing, he expanded on this:

For the rest of this calendar year and into the beginning of next year, we’ll be building out platforms that will be able to do that at all of our commercial air locations. It’s going to take us until early next year to be able to finish that. We’ve got to build the services to be able to pull the photos, we’ve got to buy the databases, the [software] matchers to be able to do the facial recognition element it has, and then look at the front-end deployment of the technology, where does it go in the airport, [find out if] the airlines will work with us.

For this, you can thank the executive order President Trump signed in back January, which directed the DHS to deploy a “biometric entry and exit tracking system” in airports across the US.

This provides tools for our country to control immigration, and is a step in the right direction for reducing the burden illegal immigration causes to American citizens.

This, coupled with building the wall, would put a major dent in illegal immigration.