NATIONAL SECURITY: Georgia Senator David Perdue speaks out on visa exit controls
FAST FACT: 500,000 foreigners overstayed their visas last year.
The below is from Insider advantage Georgia today on Georgia’s Senator David Perdue. This is in addition to the fact that he stepped up to end consideration of GALEO’s Dax Lopez for federal judge!
“In another Perdue-related development yesterday, Georgia’s junior senator spoke out forcefully on the state of the nation’s broken exit-entry visa system. He said:
“A visa entry-exit tracking system has been required by law for 20 years, yet it still does not exist. That is unacceptable. Today, (the Department of Homeland Security) cannot even tell us how many people in our country have overstayed their visas. One of the first inquiries I made of the DHS was about its progress in collecting data on this very issue. Nearly eight months later, DHS finally released a shocking report that shows more than half a million individuals unlawfully overstayed their visas in 2015. Equally as shocking, the federal government is only investigating roughly 3,000 of those individuals who are here illegally. This number of overstayed visas includes hundreds of people from countries with significant Islamic extremist movements and confirms that our immigration system is broken and presents a dire threat to our national security.” During a Senate Judiciary hearing in April 2015, Senator Perdue asked DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson to provide the committee with data on visa overstays. This week DHS released its visa overstay report that showed nearly 527,127 people overstayed their visas which expired in 2015, including: 1,435 individuals from Pakistan; 681 from Iraq; 564 from Iran; 440 from Syria; and 219 from Yemen.”
Hooray for Senator Perdue! More, please!