Thanks about your experience with Mitre.
BTW- When I posted "Half of our illegal alien population is visa overstayers" I wasn't making up this number. This has been cited by many who are responsible critics of our immigration policies. Florida is infested with Colombian and other Latino wise guy visa overstayers
We have to clamp down on the Mexico border but find another strategy for dealing with overstayers
A harder look at visa overstayers
From year 2002 NEW YORK - Let's call her Marissa. She has wavy hair in a bob and dark eyes that are quick to smile. A Palestinian from Israel fluent in four languages, she earned a graduate degree in Moscow.
She's also an illegal immigrant. Marisa - and almost half of the estimated 9 million illegal aliens in this country - has overstayed her visa. She tried to find an employer to sponsor her so she could earn a green card, but time ran out. "No one wants to be illegal," she says. "We want to work hard. We want to live happily. That's why I'm here."
It's estimated that each year more than 100,000 legal visitors decide to stay. The majority are like Marissa. In their desire for a better life, they are taking advantage of what's become the easiest, albeit illegal way, of grasping the American dream.
"The INS has always been so overwhelmed that visa overstayers never received much attention," says Nestor Rodriguez, an immigration expert at the University of Houston. "Now, post-Sept. 11, there are new and present issues of national security. The game has changed."
Over the past 30 years, the practice of visa overstaying has grown into the method of choice for millions of migrants from all over the world. And the US Congress and Immigration and Naturalization Service have actually made it fairly easy to do so: Once a foreigner is in this country, the INS has no effective way to track where they are or whether they leave when they are supposed to.
And while Marissa doesn't like to be illegal, she's also not particularly worried about getting caught. Experts say she's not alone. "We have no real idea of how many visa overstayers there are," says Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. "We certainly don't know who they are or where they are."
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LOU DOBBS/BrokenBorders/Cnn http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0510/24/ldt.01.html Aired Oct. 24, 2005 And millions of foreigners in this country illegally, not because they crossed our borders illegally, but because their visas have expired. You'll be shocked -- I think you will be shocked to hear just how few immigration officials we have assigned to track down all of those people with expired visas.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Visa holders who overstay exit date in this country can easily disappear into American life with little risk from immigration authorities. A report from the Homeland Security inspector general estimates at least 3.6 million illegal aliens are people here who overstayed their visas. Yet last year, there were only 51 agents dedicated to tracking visa violators.
REP. J.D. HAYWORTH, (R) ARIZONA: If there are so-called good people overstaying their visas, there are really bad people too. And more than just your garden variety of criminal, probably in that group, sad to say, are those folks who belong to terrorist cells who mean to do us harm. ROMANS: Immigration and Customs Enforcement received more than 300,000 leads last year on visa violators. The inspector general found authorities investigated just over 4,000 and apprehended only 671.(snip)