WHILE FOCUSING ON SOUTHERN BORDER, OVERSTAYS IGNORED

By Miriam Jordan

New York Times

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Eddie Oh, an industrial engineer, lost his job during the financial crisis that gripped South Korea in 1998. With no prospects, he scrounged together his savings to pay his family’s airfare to California. They were going on vacation, he told the United States embassy, which issued six-month visitor visas for the family.

The Ohs headed to Sunnyvale, a middle-class community in California’s Silicon Valley where a relative already had rented a small apartment. The Ohs moved in, nine people crammed into two rooms. Mr. Oh got to work painting houses. His wife found a job as a waitress. And their children, Eli, 11, and Sue, 9, started school.

“We were constantly in debt. We struggled to pay the rent,” said Eli Oh, who grew up to be a critical-care response nurse at Stanford University. “Nobody ever thought we were illegally here because we didn’t fit the stereotype.”

They are hardly alone. Though President Trump has staked much of his presidency on halting the movement of undocumented immigrants across the southern border, the Oh family’s roundabout route to residence in the United States is part of one of America’s least widely known immigration stories

Some 350,000 travelers arrive by air in the United States each day. From Asia, South America and Africa, they come mostly with visas allowing them to tour, study, do business or attend a conference for an authorized period of time. But when they stay beyond when their visas expire, some of them fall into the same illegal status often associated with migrants showing up at the border.

Nearly half of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now in the country did not trek through the desert or wade across the Rio Grande to enter the country; they flew in with a visa, passed inspection at the airport — and stayed.

Of the roughly 3.5 million undocumented immigrants who entered the country between 2010 and 2017, 65 percent arrived with full permission stamped into their passports, according to new figures compiled by the Center for Migration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank. During that period, more overstayers arrived from India than from any other country.

“A big overlooked immigration story is that twice as many people came in with a visa than came across the border illegally in recent years,” said Robert Warren, the demographer who calculated overstay estimates by using the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey and shared those figures with The New York Times.

As Mr. Trump has called for hiring thousands of new Border Patrol agents and erecting miles of new fencing, federal immigration authorities have devoted relatively few resources toward the much larger numbers of undocumented immigrants who have overstayed their visas.

The  Department of Homeland Security said it has succeeded in bringing the number of visa overstayers down slightly over the past two years, but enforcement is difficult because authorities are only beginning to gain access to better data on who has and has not flown out of the country.

“Once they are in the country, they are home free because there is so little interior enforcement,” said Jessica Vaughan, a former federal visa officer who is now policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, which lobbies for restricting immigration.

To fread rest of the story, click on link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/01/us/undocumented-visa-overstays.html