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The entry part of a new electronic entry/exit system that U.S. government officials
hope will be able to keep more accurate track of who has entered the country,
who has exited it, and who has overstayed their nonimmigrant visa will be in
place at U.S. air and seaports "starting January 5, 2004," the Dept. of Homeland
Security (DHS) has announced. According to the DHS's Oct. 29, 2003, press release,
the department expects that the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator
Technology (US-VISIT) system "will be in place at 115 airports and 14 major
seaports in early 2004" and that it "will be phased in at U.S. land borders
throughout 2005 and 2006."
The wording of the announcement ("starting January 5")
indicates that the DHS does not expect to have finished installing the US-VISIT
system in the air and seaports until sometime after Jan. 5, despite a statutory
deadline of Dec. 31, 2003, for doing so. Other statutory deadlines that will be
missed, if the announcement's projections hold true, are those for installing the system at the 50
busiest land ports of entry (Dec. 31, 2004) and at all ports of entry (Dec.
31, 2005).
The DHS is rushing to implement the first phase of the system as soon after
the initial deadline as possible, despite a warning by the U.S. General Accounting
Office (GAO), contained in a Sept. 2003 report, that one of the factors making
the US-VISIT program "a very risky endeavor" is its planned use of interim,
temporary systems until more permanent (and presumably more reliable) ones can
be developed and implemented. Besides being driven by the statutory deadlines,
the haste to implement US-VISIT is also a result of pressure the DHS feels to
show something for the money that has been poured into the program thus far-$380
million appropriated for fiscal year 2003 and $330 million for FY 2004 (though
the Bush administration had requested $444 million for 2004).
When fully implemented, US-VISIT should make it possible to record electronically
the entry of non-U.S. citizen visitors into the U.S. as well as their exit from
the country, and to verify each visitor's identity via biometric identifiers
encoded in their travel documents. In theory, the system also will tell immigration
officials which foreign visitors have failed to leave the country by the date
they were supposed to have left.
Under the new system, all arriving nonimmigrant visitors will be interviewed
by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers, who will review their
travel documents and ask them questions about their planned stay in the U.S.
While being interviewed, each visitor will be required to place the index finger
of each hand on an electronic fingerprint scanner, and a photograph will be
taken of the visitor's face. The "biographic" information (i.e., name, address,
etc.) the visitor provides, along with the biometrics data (i.e., the fingerprint
scans and photograph), will be run through the system to verify the visitor's
identity and check whether he or she is on a "watch list" (i.e., a list of suspected
terrorists, wanted criminals, etc.). Depending on the results the officer receives
from the system, the officer will either admit the visitor or require that he
or she be examined further.
When they are about to depart the U.S., visitors will "check out" at a special
"departure kiosk" located in the secure area of the air or seaport through which
they are departing. The check-out process will consist of visitors again having
their fingerprints scanned, as well as their travel documents. This process
is intended to be a do-it-yourself one, though plans call for the kiosks to
be staffed by attendants who will help people needing it. However, the departure
kiosk part of the system will not be operational until sometime later in 2004,
according to the DHS. Until then, electronic passenger manifests that air and
sea carriers are required by law to transmit to immigration authorities before
their vessels land in or leave the U.S. and I-94 forms that are completed upon
passengers' arriving in and departing from the U.S. "will be reconciled to verify
departures."
The electronic records of visitors who fail to check out of the U.S. via the
kiosks or within the time allotted by their visas will be flagged, according
to the DHS. The consequences of failing to comply with the terms of their visas
or with the US-VISIT system requirements may include being removed from the
U.S. or refused entry into the U.S. on a subsequent attempt to visit.
In order to do the job required of it, the US-VISIT system
will need to be able to collect and record electronically all the information it
uses. To make this possible, the essential information contained in the travel
documents used by persons seeking to visit the U.S. will have to be
"machine-readable" -- i.e., readable by a scanning machine that sends the
information to a computer database. For this reason, section 303 of the Enhanced
Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 requires that, by Oct. 26,
2004, countries that are part of the Visa Waiver Program -- i.e., those whose nationals may travel to the U.S.
as visitors without first obtaining a visa -- must, in order to continue their
participation in the program, certify that they have instituted programs for
issuing tamper-resistant, machine-readable passports that incorporate "biometric
and document-authentication identifiers that comply with applicable . . . standards
established by the International Civil Aviation Organization." And by that same
date, visas and other travel documents issued by the Depts. of State or Homeland
Security also must incorporate biometric identifiers and be machine-readable.
After Oct. 26, 2004, no person from a country that is part of the Visa Waiver
Program will be granted entry to the U.S. without a visa unless his or her passport
incorporates biometric identifiers and is machine-readable.
If it works as planned, ultimately the US-VISIT system
will be able to tell those with access to it the dates that a visitor arrived
and departed the U.S., the visitor's nationality, and whether the visitor is an
immigrant or a nonimmigrant. In addition, the system will contain the biometric
identifiers -- i.e., two scanned
fingerprints and one photograph -- for each nonimmigrant visitor. (However, unless
current policy is changed, "most Canadians [will not be] subject to US-VISIT,"
according to a question-and-answer "backgrounder" available from the DHS at www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/USVISIT_QnA_102703.PDF.) And who will have
access to this information? According to the DHS, the long list of those with
access will include CBP officers at ports of entry, special agents of U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE), adjudications staff at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services (CIS) offices, U.S. consular officers, as well as "appropriate" federal,
state, and local law enforcement personnel.
However, those who are charged with developing and implementing US-VISIT will
have to overcome formidable obstacles if the system is to work reliably as conceived.
As the GAO's Sept. 2003 report notes, the task that US-VISIT is intended to
accomplish is "large in scope and complex." For example, it involves multiple
federal departments and agencies -- including ICE, CBP, CIS, the Transportation
Security Administration, the Depts. of Transportation and State, and the General
Services Administration -- and it necessitates "interconnect[ing] about 20 existing
systems" that are not necessarily compatible with each other. In addition, the
existing systems on which US-VISIT will have to rely, at least initially, have
been plagued by troubles of their own, including problems that limit the availability
of the data they collect.
In order to meet daunting deadlines while being neither fully staffed nor with
the necessary systems in place to do all the planning and research required
to develop an efficient, bug-free system, US-VISIT staff and contractors are
being forced to make initial assumptions that may later turn out to be deficient
or erroneous and thus eventually force sizeable and expensive system overhauls,
the GAO report warns. And, especially with respect to land ports of entry, a
number of existing facilities are not equipped to handle existing processes
adequately, much less the new ones that will be necessary to make US-VISIT fully
operational. Wait times at land ports of entry that handle a very high volume
of traffic shoot up when any new process adds even a couple of seconds to the
time it takes to clear each vehicle for entry into the U.S., the GAO report
warns. And until interim, and then permanent, systems have been developed and
debugged, any planning for and construction of new facilities -- or modification
of existing ones -- will be highly problematic.
All this complexity will make US-VISIT hugely expensive to implement and subject
to enormous cost overruns. The DHS's original estimate of the system's total
cost -- $7.2 billion through fiscal year 2014 -- is "outdated," according to the GAO's
report, and does not include large, necessary expenses such as the cost of developing
and implementing machine-readable visas that incorporate biometric identifiers,
which the GAO estimates could add $15 billion to US-VISIT's overall cost through
2014.
The program that has become US-VISIT was conceived by the same conservative
Congress that began the dismantlement of the U.S.'s social welfare safety net,
which included stripping non-U.S. citizen immigrants of their access to most
safety-net programs. Section 110 of the act that accomplished that -- the Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) -- provided
that the attorney general was to develop an automated entry and exit control
system, to make a record of the entry to and exit from the country of each noncitizen
visitor. IIRIRA sec. 110 was amended and replaced by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service Data Management Improvement Act of 2000, which mandates that the separate
electronic systems being used by the Depts. of Justice and State to record the
arrivals and departures of foreign visitors be integrated with each other.
Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, followed by the hasty drafting and
passage of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. That act requires that the implementation
of the automated entry/exit record system be hastened, that the White House
Office of Homeland Security be consulted about the development and implementation
of the system, and that biometrics be incorporated into the system. And finally,
the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 moved up preexisting
statutory deadlines for implementing a more fully electronic entry/exit system,
imposed new requirements regarding the incorporation of biometrics into travel
documents, and required that the system be compatible with systems used by other
law enforcement and intelligence agencies, in addition to requiring that air
and sea carriers electronically transmit detailed arrival and departure manifests
(containing information about passengers) to immigration/border control officials
prior to the carriers' vessels landing in or departing from U.S. air and seaports.
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