The Corker-Hoeven visa overstay loophole

You can build the largest fence in the world, and man it with a million border patrol agents, but if you invite hundreds of thousands of immigrants [illegal aliens] to enter the country legally every year on a “temporary” basis, and then fail to track whether or not they leave, you’ll still get a large illegal [alien] immigrant population. And that is exactly the problem with the Corker-Hoeven immigration amendment.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, about 45 percent of the current illegal immigrant population first came to the United States on a legal visa, and only became part of the unauthorized population when they remained in the country after their visa expired.

And according to the Congressional Budget Office, not only will the Schumer-Rubio immigration bill leave 3.5 million immigrants [illegal aliens] in the country without legal status, but it will also add about 4.8 million people to the illegal immigrant [alien] population by 2023, thanks to the bill’s “temporary” guest worker program.

In other words, even after spending $46 billion on border security over the next ten years, the Schumer-Rubio immigration does nothing to solve the illegal immigration problem. We will still have an 8.3 million person illegal immigrant population and Democrats will be pushing for yet another amnesty.

Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and John Hoeven, R-N.D., have put out a fact sheet claiming to have solved this problem. “In addition to the border security measures outlined above, the amendment mandates the initiation of removal proceedings for at least 90 percent of visa overstays – 40 percent of the illegal immigration problem – holding DHS accountable for failing to enforce the law and targeting an issue that is at the core of a policy of de facto amnesty,” they write.

There are two big problems with this claim:

First, their amendment in no way mandates the removal of 90 percent of visa overstays...

Second, this “90 percent” removal requirement language comes after a list of the five triggers that are required before illegal immigrants can get green cards. That is because this 90 percent removal requirement is not a trigger...

Democrats would never have allowed an amendment requiring a metric like “90 percent of all visa overstays must be deported before any registered provisional immigrant can get a green card” because that is exactly the type of language that made the Cornyn amendment unacceptable to them...

That is all Corker-Hoeven does to stop visa overstays: A pilot program that asks visitors who are about to overstay their visas to “pretty please” leave before they become illegal immigrants [illegal aliens]...