US dropping effort to track if visitors leave

[Kathryn41 3,205]

U.S. Is Dropping Effort to Track if Visitors Leave

Published: December 15, 2006

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 — In a major blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to secure borders, domestic security officials have for now given up on plans to develop a facial or fingerprint recognition system to determine whether a vast majority of foreign visitors leave the country, officials say.

Domestic security officials had described the system, known as U.S. Visit, as critical to security and important in efforts to curb illegal immigration. Similarly, one-third of the overall total of illegal immigrants are believed to have overstayed their visas, a Congressional report says.

Tracking visitors took on particular urgency after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became clear that some of the hijackers had remained in the country after their visas had expired.

But in recent days, officials at the Homeland Security Department have conceded that they lack the financing and technology to meet their deadline to have exit-monitoring systems at the 50 busiest land border crossings by next December. A vast majority of foreign visitors enter and exit by land from Mexico and Canada, and the policy shift means that officials will remain unable to track the departures.

A report released on Thursday by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, restated those findings, reporting that the administration believes that it will take 5 to 10 years to develop technology that might allow for a cost-effective departure system.

Domestic security officials, who have allocated $1.7 billion since the 2003 fiscal year to track arrivals and departures, argue that creating the program with the existing technology would be prohibitively expensive.

They say it would require additional employees, new buildings and roads at border crossings, and would probably hamper the vital flow of commerce across those borders.

Congress ordered the creation of such a system in 1996.

In an interview last week, the assistant secretary for homeland security policy, Stewart A. Baker, estimated that an exit system at the land borders would cost “tens of billions of dollars” and said the department had concluded that such a program was not feasible, at least for the time being.

“It is a pretty daunting set of costs, both for the U.S. government and the economy,” Mr. Stewart said. “Congress has said, ‘We want you to do it.’ We are not going to ignore what Congress has said. But the costs here are daunting.

“There are a lot of good ideas and things that would make the country safer. But when you have to sit down and compare all the good ideas people have developed against each other, with a limited budget, you have to make choices that are much harder.”

The news sent alarms to Congress, where some Republicans and Democrats warned that suspending the monitoring plan would leave the United States vulnerable.

Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is a departing subcommittee chairman on the House International Relations Committee, said the administration could not say it was protecting domestic security without creating a viable exit monitoring system.

“There will not be border security in this country until we have a knowledge of both entry and exit,” Mr. Rohrabacher said. “We have to make a choice. Do we want to act and control our borders or do we want to have tens of millions of illegals continuing to pour into our country?”

Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is set to lead the Homeland Security Committee, also expressed concern.

“It is imperative that Congress work in partnership with the department to develop a comprehensive border security system that ensures we know who is entering and exiting this country and one that cannot be defeated by imposters, criminals and terrorists,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement Thursday.

In January 2004, domestic security officials began fingerprint scanning for arriving visitors. The program has screened more than 64 million travelers and prevented more than 1,300 criminals and immigration violators from entering, officials said.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other officials often call the program a singular achievement in making the country safer. U.S. Visit fingerprints and photographs 2 percent of the people entering the country, because Americans and most Canadians and Mexicans are exempt.

Efforts to determine whether visitors actually leave have faltered. Departure monitoring would help officials hunt for foreigners who have not left, if necessary. Domestic security officials say, however, it would be too expensive to conduct fingerprint or facial recognition scans for land departures. Officials have experimented with less costly technologies, including a system that would monitor by radio data embedded in a travel form carried by foreigners as they depart by foot or in vehicles.

Tests of that technology, Radio Frequency Identification, found a high failure rate. At one border point, the system correctly identified 14 percent of the 166 vehicles carrying the embedded documents, the General Accountability Office reported.

The Congressional investigators noted the “numerous performance and reliability problems” with the technology and said it remained unclear how domestic security officials would be able to meet their legal obligation to create an exit program.

Some immigration analysts said stepping away from the program raised questions again about the commitment to enforce border security and immigration laws.

A senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, Jessica Vaughn, said the government had long been too deferential to big businesses and travel groups that raised concerns that exit technology might disrupt travel and trade.

“I worry that the issue of cost is an excuse for not doing anything,” said Ms. Vaughn, whose group advocates curbing immigration. Domestic security officials said they still hoped to find a way to create an exit system at land borders. “We would to do more testing,” a spokesman for the department, Jarrod Agen, said. “We are evaluating the initial tests to determine how to move forward.”

[Dr_LHA 3]

In January 2004, domestic security officials began fingerprint scanning for arriving visitors. The program has screened more than 64 million travelers and prevented more than 1,300 criminals and immigration violators from entering, officials said.

Wow 1300 people out of 64,000,000. That's a laughably small number.

[Kathryn41 3,205]

Actually, that was one of my initial responses as well.

[peejay 327]

In January 2004, domestic security officials began fingerprint scanning for arriving visitors. The program has screened more than 64 million travelers and prevented more than 1,300 criminals and immigration violators from entering, officials said.

Wow 1300 people out of 64,000,000. That's a laughably small number.

That is because they have put laughingly little time, money, and effort into creating a coherent database and reliable system. About the same as they have put into a work verification system to determine legal work authorization. Social Security Administration is prohibited by law from even sharing information with DHS.

The politicians' solution is to grant amnesty to everyone that violates the laws to clear the slate every 20 years. And they use the same crappy tools and systems to to that as the number of frauds getting amnesty proved in 1986.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Think of all the billions wasted on Iraq that could have made our country more secure on our own soil by creating a competent system for visitors and workplace screening.

[zyggy 9]

Actually, that was one of my initial responses as well.

Yeah, but if you or someone you loved were subsequently a victim of that criminal who actually got into the US you wouldn't be laughing would you...

Edited December 15, 2006 by zyggy

[Dr_LHA 3]

Yeah, but if you or someone you loved were subsequently a victim of that criminal who actually got into the US you wouldn't be laughing would you...

Its a tragic laugh, not a "funny" laugh. Catching 1300 out of 64,000,000 shows the system is horribly broken and ineffective. I find it extremely hard to believe that out of those 64 million, only 0.002% of them were fraudsters and criminals.

Edited December 15, 2006 by dr_lha

[peejay 327]

Yeah, but if you or someone you loved were subsequently a victim of that criminal who actually got into the US you wouldn't be laughing would you...

Its a tragic laugh, not a "funny" laugh. Catching 1300 out of 64,000,000 shows the system is horribly broken and ineffective. I find it extremely hard to believe that out of those 64 million, only 0.002% of them were fraudsters and criminals.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. If the USA could and did make the commitment to put a man on the moon decades ago, we could master the technology to reliably keep known fraudsters, criminals, and terrorists from entering the USA. Not to mention...tracking visa absconders that violated the terms of their visas.

As it is...Congress is in a huge hurry to lift caps on existing work visa catagories and has grandiose plans to create a huge new low skill / low wage guestworker catagory. In the mean time there is no way to accurately track whether these people leave when their visas expire. They are clueless whether the millions that enter our country legally are still in status and whether they have left the USA.

These idiots need to put the horse before the cart. They need to put a reliable entry/exit system in place before they burden the system with more and more visa holders that cannot be tracked.

Edited December 15, 2006 by peejay

[mawilson 2,133]

Great!

[Ranmaru 0]

Yeah, but if you or someone you loved were subsequently a victim of that criminal who actually got into the US you wouldn't be laughing would you...

Its a tragic laugh, not a "funny" laugh. Catching 1300 out of 64,000,000 shows the system is horribly broken and ineffective. I find it extremely hard to believe that out of those 64 million, only 0.002% of them were fraudsters and criminals.

Without knowing exactly how many of those 64,000,000 TRAVELERS were actually 'convicts' (or criminals, whatever) that were /not/ allowed into the country...

(not to mention that some already get stopped BEFORE they even get into the USA)...

Those numbers mean absolutely nothing.

[Dr_LHA 3]

Without knowing exactly how many of those 64,000,000 TRAVELERS were actually 'convicts' (or criminals, whatever) that were /not/ allowed into the country...

(not to mention that some already get stopped BEFORE they even get into the USA)...

Those numbers mean absolutely nothing.

The numbers are only meaningless if you're not willing to make any estimate at all of what the number should be.

The question is: do you honestly think the amount of criminals coming into the country who should not be allowed in is 0.002% of all travellers?

Also given the fact that I know several people who were deported from the US upon entry for no good reason other than some minor visa irregularity (usually caused by USCIS or their employee's visa lawyers), who are probably included in that 1300, I can't say I am very confident that even that 1300 represented real bad people.

[Caladan 19]

Actually, that was one of my initial responses as well.

Yeah, but if you or someone you loved were subsequently a victim of that criminal who actually got into the US you wouldn't be laughing would you...

Either there are only 1300 criminals out of 64 million or there aren't. If there are, then surely there's got to be a more efficient use for the money to catch those 1300 baddies than scanning 64 million people, and the money could be put to better use. If there aren't, then the screening isn't actually catching most of the baddies, in which case it's pretty ineffective and a waste of money.