The easiest way into America

There has been no shortage of coverage of the 10 million-plus illegal aliens who have stormed our borders, the 5 million-plus who’ve been waived into the country and the Biden/Harris administration’s misuse of the humanitarian parole system. But almost nothing has been written about a legal, backdoor entry to the United States that large numbers of migrants continue to exploit: increasingly easy-to-obtain American tourist visas.

As I’ve been documenting since 2008, many aspiring migrants find it easy to fraudulently convince my former colleagues at the State Department that they qualify for tourist visas and thus do not need a coyote to help them sneak into the country. But it appears as though this trend has gone into overdrive during the Biden-Harris administration. Democrats have denied that Kamala Harris was Biden’s border czar, but he did formally task her on March 24, 2021 “to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle… in… stemming the migration to our southern border.”

The vice president bumptiously lectured us about “root causes,” which will take decades or centuries to address and often insinuated that climate change rather than the administration’s own lax policies were to blame for the crisis. She also traveled to Guatemala and Mexico in 2021 and 2022 and told migrants not to enter the US illegally.

But did she or other administration officials also putting pressure on embassy officials to ease up on visa issuance as a means of ameliorating the embarrassing number of illegal border crossings?

American embassies weren’t open for routine visa processing during the pandemic, so visa adjudication numbers for fiscal years 2020 and 2021 aren’t reliable. In 2019, the global refusal rate for tourist visas was 30 percent and declined to 21 percent in 2022 and 24 percent in 2023.

But the tourist visa refusal statistics reveal much more dramatic declines at posts that send us the most illegal immigrants when comparing 2019 versus 2022 and 2023, as seen in the chart below.

Consular officers are required by law to deny any tourist visa applicant who cannot convince them that he’ll return to his home country. In other words, the law requires officers to consider all tourist visa applicants as guilty of being an intending immigrant unless they can convince the officer they have very strong ties to their home country and will not seek to work and/or live in the US. This is a heavy burden for migrants from poor countries where illegal migration is common. But many (though not all) of my former colleagues are progressives who tend to give applicants the benefit of the doubt. At some posts, chiefs of mission, some of them political appointees, could be pressuring managers to be lenient to reduce migrant flows at the border.

How else could one explain how the refusal rate in Guatemala, for example, plummeted from 59 percent during the last year of the Trump administration to 5 percent in 2022 and 22 percent in 2023? According to the World Bank, Guatemala’s GDP growth rate was 4 percent in 2019, 4.1 percent in 2022 and 3.5 percent in 2023.

In a November press briefing, Julie Stufft, one of the State Department’s lead officials on visa issuance, said she was “very excited to be able to say that… there are more people who hold US visas… than at any time in our history.” She said State was processing a “staggering” number of (non-immigrant) visas — more than 10.5 million in FY 2023, compared to 8.5 million in 2019. Stufft said she hoped the Department would extend a waiver that permits applicants who have been to the US before to renew their visas by mail. In fact, the following month, the State Department announced that they were expanding the renew by mail program.

Legitimate tourists — the kind who stay in hotels, eat in restaurants, rent cars and create jobs here are vital to our economy. But in my experience, a huge percentage of tourist visa applicants from poor countries stay with friends and relatives and aren’t what you’d categorize as legitimate tourists. Even worse, our lax enforcement encourages many to stay once they find out that they can enroll their children in public schools and get jobs on the black market. We also invite those on tourist visas to work illegally by authorizing them to stay in the country for six months and letting them renew those visas for up to eighteen months.

Real tourists rarely spend that much time in the US, but the lax standard is convenient for those who want to work on the black market, make some money and then return home. And then allowing such people to renew their visas with no in person scrutiny only exacerbates the problem. When I interviewed visa applicants who had prior visas, I evaluated how much time they had spent in the US, how they financed those trips and what their current financial situation was. None of that is possible with renewal by mail.

I asked the State Department to explain why tourist visa refusal rates declined in the countries that send us the most illegal immigrants, even as massive numbers of aliens from those countries pored across our borders in recent years. They dodged the question and instead bombarded me with irrelevant platitudes and statistics. “The refusal rate is a product of millions of individual decisions made every day by our consular officers around the world,” wrote a press officer responding to my inquiry. “Because so many factors influence each visa adjudication, there is no one reason why a refusal rate goes up or down.”

Most of the rest of her reply was full of statistics that illuminate my point — the State Department is issuing visas like never before. Here are some of the figures they sent me.

In federal fiscal year (FY) 2023 (October 2022 through September 2023), the Department of State issued a near record level of visas — more than 10.4 million nonimmigrant visas globally. The positive momentum of 2023’s record-breaking year continues in 2024. In the first half of federal fiscal year (FY) 2024 (October 2023 to March 2024), the State Department issued nearly 5.2 million nonimmigrant visas worldwide, more than in any previous year over the same period. We set all-time records for nonimmigrant visas

issued by the half-fiscal year mark at 30 percent of our US embassies and consulates overseas… Nearly two-thirds of visitor visas (and border crossing cards) were issued in Mexico, India, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China, Colombia, Argentina, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador. Together these missions issued almost 40 percent more than over the same period in FY 2019.

While it’s unclear if the Biden-Harris administration pressured the State Department to ease up on visa adjudication or not, it’s apparent to me that a customer service mentality prevails at State at a time when a law enforcement approach is what is needed. It’s easy to see why applicant numbers are soaring. When one person gets a visa, they tell everyone they know, thus encouraging others to try their luck. By contrast, when someone is refused, they tell others and that discourages them from applying.

The bottom line is that it’s remarkably easy to abuse tourist visas and other types of non-immigrant visas — and so being tough only on those who cross illegally isn’t enough. Section 214 (b) of the Immigration & Nationality Act requires consular officials to treat tourist visa applicants as guilty of being intending immigrants unless they’re able to provide compelling proof they are not. Instead, tourist visas have become an increasingly easy ticket during an administration that’s grown desperate to stem the tide of migrants at the border but not the actual flow of immigrants into the country.