The Patriot Post® · Our Nation's Visa Program Is a Mess
The Biden administration’s failed immigration policy is evident in more than just the additional 5.6 million illegal immigrants it has allowed to slip through our porous southern border in the last two years. The nation’s visa program is also a mess and desperately in need of an immediate fix.
The Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) has a backlog of 8.6 million visa applications. This processing backlog leads to a reduction in the number of student and worker visas being granted, the result of which ultimately means that other countries get to take advantage of the intellectual capital that our government doesn’t seem too interested in attracting.
The visa application system includes wage certification and labor law compliance processes that can each take up to 10 months to complete. That’s half the time it takes to earn an associate’s degree, and as much as the entire time it takes for a foreign worker to complete an international assignment in the U.S. Given this, it’s not hard to see why foreign companies and families might rather choose another country for their business or for their children’s education.
Then there are those who overstay their visas — more than 684,000 of them in 2020, which is the latest year for which the Department of Homeland Security has numbers. This total is close to the levels of the preceding five years, with more than half of the overstays occurring in the short-term visitor category. There was a 39% drop in student overstays since 2016, and a 30% drop in temporary worker overstays from the year before, thanks in part to an effective Trump administration crackdown.
The broken visa system doesn’t seem to be raising alarms because the total number of overstays was relatively static for five years. But regardless of their legal status, 684,000 people is far too many to be allowed to run around on expired visas, to say nothing about the more than 20 million illegal immigrants in America. And let’s not forget that these overstay numbers were recorded during the pandemic, when visa applications decreased significantly.
The perception that these overstays are harmless presents a serious obstacle to finding and deporting them. Because they came here legally, an assumption exists that they’re law-abiding individuals. In the vast number of cases, they may very well be — with the glaring exception being that they neglected to follow the first basic rule that gained them entry into the United States. But it’s impossible to know how many might be part of a terrorist cell, or might be undercover operatives working for the Chinese government or for another country seeking to exploit our broken immigration system for its own gain. It doesn’t take a lot of these rogues to create a true national security risk, and it’s happened before.
The problem isn’t that the best and brightest want to come to America, bringing their entrepreneurial or intellectual skill with them. It’s that the federal government’s bureaucracy has made compliance so difficult that people either overstay visas or illegally cross the southern border.
The visa system can be fixed, however. Instead of hiring tens of thousands of new IRS employees to needlessly complicate the lives of American taxpayers, we can add more employees at CIS to expand the processing of visa applications. We can also give applicants the option to pay a fee for faster service, and then use that revenue to hire more staff. In addition, applications can be streamlined to apply to specific visa categories and reduce the bureaucratic workload.
These aren’t complex or outrageous solutions. Far from it. Like tightening border security and keeping track of the people we let into our country, all it takes is the political willpower to make it happen.