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By
Richard Irwin
Editor, Immigrants' Rights Update
The Dept. of Homeland Security has given up on
trying to develop and implement the land-exit component of its U.S.
Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) system by
its Dec. 2007 deadline, and DHS officials have said that it might take
an additional 5 to 10 years to develop the technology required to make
that part of US-VISIT cost-effective, according to an article in the
Dec. 15, 2006, New York Times. The article quoted the assistant
secretary for homeland security, Stewart A. Baker, as saying that
developing and implementing a system for electronically tracking who
leaves the country by land would cost “tens of billions of dollars.”
Because the vast majority of visitors to the U.S. enter and exit via
land ports of entry on the borders with Mexico and Canada, this
development represents a huge setback to US-VISIT.
It also serves as a graphic illustration that just
because Congress orders, via enacted legislation, a technological
solution to a major problem confronting the country does not necessarily
mean that such a solution is feasible. Yet legislators, as though they
were waving a magic wand, continue to indulge the temptation to enact
into law increasingly unrealistic deadlines by which government agencies
are to find and implement technological fixes to bafflingly complex
problems. US-VISIT is just one instance of this syndrome. REAL-ID and
the employment eligibility verification Basic Pilot, reported on
elsewhere in this issue of
Immigrants’ Rights Update, are two others.
How to keep track of who exits the U.S. after
entering as a visitor is a problem for which Congress first ordered a
solution in 1996. Section 110 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and
Immigrant Responsibility Act (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 mandated 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 required that the implementation of the automated entry/exit record
system be hastened and that biometrics be incorporated into the system.
Subsequently, 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.
The Dept. of Homeland Security, which when it was
created after 9/11 inherited the mandate to develop and implement the
electronic entry/exit system, responded by beginning to develop and
implement US-VISIT.
However, as
Immigrants’ Rights Update reported in Nov. 2003, a Government
Accountability Office (then known as the General Accounting Office)
report issued earlier that year warned that the task that US-VISIT is
intended to accomplish is huge and very complex. For example, it
involves multiple federal departments and agencies — including U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection,
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 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 has 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 having 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 were being forced to make initial
assumptions that could later turn out to be deficient or erroneous and
thus eventually force sizeable and expensive system overhauls, the GAO
report warned. 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 warned. 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 continue to make US-VISIT
hugely expensive to implement and will subject it to enormous cost
overruns. The DHS’s original estimate of the system’s total cost — $7.2
billion through fiscal year 2014 — was already “outdated” in 2003,
according to the GAO report, and did not even include large, necessary
expenses such as the cost of developing and implementing
machine-readable visas that incorporate biometric identifiers, which in
2003 the GAO estimated could add $15 billion to US-VISIT’s overall cost
through 2014. And now the assistant secretary for homeland security
policy has stated for the record that developing and implementing just
the land-exit component of US-VISIT will cost “tens of billions of
dollars.”
More information about the complex obstacles
US-VISIT faces is available in the GAO’s Dec. 2006 report, “US-VISIT Program Faces
Strategic, Operational, and Technological Challenges at Land Ports of
Entry.”
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