Roughly 400,000 people are living in the US beyond their tourism visas

Boston Globe

2 days ago

The number of people entering the US using temporary visa programs has surged nationally in recent years. Last year, around 8.4 million temporary visas were issued to foreigners visiting the US for business or pleasure, up from 6.5 million back in 2019, according to government data.
Around 565,000 nonimmigrant visitors had overstayed their visas by Sept. 2023,
Advertisement
These classes of visa
Advertisement
But those overstay rates varied widely by country. Haiti had an overstay rate of around 31 percent, while Japan's was just 0.2 percent. Visitors from Egypt, where Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the accused Colorado attacker, is from, had an overstay rate of a little over 4 percent. Overall, the overstay rate was 1.45 percent.
Mexico far outpaced all other countries in temporary U.S. visa application approvals, with about 1.8 million issued in 2023. Brazil, India, Colombia, and Argentina also ranked among the top countries.
Arnoldo Benitez, an immigration lawyer who has offices in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, estimated about 30 percent of his clients entered the country through visas and overstayed.
'They were given a certain amount of time in the US, and for whatever reason they overstayed,' he said. 'Now they are in the process of adjusting status.'
Robert Warren, a senior visiting fellow at The Center for Migration Studies of New York, said that visa overstayers have always been a part of the immigration story in the US.
'In the last 30 or 40 years, probably 40 percent or so [of undocumented immigrants] have been overstayers. And the rest have come across the Southern border. It's pretty constant,' Warren said. 'It's something that's always gone along at the same time that people were coming across the southern border ... It's just never really been recognized before.'
Immigration experts say that getting a visa to the US, including for short-term visits, is not easy.
Applicants have to complete a visa form, go through a national security check, pay a fee, and schedule and attend an interview at the local US consulate.
The interview acts as a screener to determine whether someone seeking a visa has deep ties in their country of origin — to demonstrate that they will return there — and have the financial means to finance their trip, said Stephanie Marzouk, a Cambridge-based immigration lawyer.
Advertisement
'They look at factors such as — what is your career in your home country? What family ties do you have there, right? Is it a person who has a spouse and children, who's coming to the US?' Marzouk said.
'It's not as though they're just handing them out like candy,' Marzouk said. 'Even if you have legitimate family ties or another legitimate reason for coming to the U.S., it's is not always granted.'
Approval rates vary depending on a country of origin, said Xiao Wang, founder and CEO of Seattle-based
'It's based off of the US's history with applicants from that country, and specifics about the [individual's] background,' Wang said. 'So when you go to this interview, it can feel very ... very stressful.'
Mary Holper, the director of the Immigration Clinic and a clinical professor at Boston College Law School, said that a significant number of visitors tend to avoid overstaying because the penalties for such infractions can be severe.
'If they overstay, that subjects them to deportation. So, for [a lot] of people they don't want to be in a position of being deportable,' she told the Globe.
Holper also said that someone overstaying their allowed visiting period, which for a B1/B2 can be up to six months, means their visa could be invalidated making it nearly impossible to get a new one in the future.
Advertisement
'So, there are reasons why someone would be incentivized to not overstay their visa because they want to be able to keep coming back and forth,' she said. 'They don't want to jeopardize their opportunity to ever get a visa again.'
Marzouk said that sometimes people overstay because going back to their country of origin can be unsafe.
'I think under international law, that wouldn't be considered as an abuse because if people are fleeing persecution, you know, they have a right to do that and they should be able to,' she said. 'They have to get to the US somehow in order to be safe, in order to claim that asylum.'
The fact that visas aren't always granted is not something most Americans understand, said Wang from Boundless.
'Many American citizens often don't even realize that you need visas to visit countries, because with their passport they can often ... visit countries without having to file the paperwork in advance,' he said.
That privilege isn't shared by those who want to come visit the US.
'[They] have to go through a rigorous interview process around the intent of their visits to the US, and that has, in total, has resulted in a relatively low percentage of people who overstay their visa and become undocumented in the US,' Wang said.
Omar Mohammed can be reached at