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

[Digitonomy]

This is unfortunate.

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.

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.
Source

 

[jc-servant]

We don’t tend to deport people even when we find out that they are not here legally (expired visas or whatever the reason), so it’s no surprise that we will continue along in blissful ignorance of who is actually in the country and who leaves voluntarily.

When I was a police officer back in the 80’s and '90’s we would run across people for various reasons who had expired student or tourist visas or no paperwork at all and I never once got the feds to agree to pick them up. None of them were “violent” criminals supposedly because we had not arrested them at that moment for a violent crime. Therefore, the feds could not spare the personnel or funds to get rid of them. If they were too understaffed back then to deport people, then I wonder what they are doing now with the huge increase in illegal entries through Mexico?