President Donald Trump’s new executive decision to order a 90 day immigration moratorium on persons from six terrorism-linked Mideast countries comes amid reports that America’s illegal immigration problem is caused, in large part, by legal immigration.
Here’s why: The U.S. is legally admitting large numbers of people who do not go home after their visas expire.
Since 2007, a majority of undocumented immigrants in the United States are the result of visa overstays, not illegal border crossers, according to a report from the Center for Migration Studies in New York.
The report found that an astounding two-thirds of illegals who arrived in 2014 “were admitted (after screening) to the United States on non-immigrant (temporary) visas, and then overstayed their period of admission or otherwise violated the terms of their visas — a trend likely to continue,” according to a CMS statement.
In 2014, about 4.5 million U.S. residents, or 42 percent of the population of roughly 11 million illegal immigrants, were foreign arrivals who had overstayed their visas, the report says.
“What’s happened is that popular conception has made it seem that illegal immigration means people coming from the southern border,” said Robert Warren, a co-author of the report. “One of the reasons we put the report out is that illegal immigration is much more varied and we need to look at different policy options.”
President Trump’s moratorium on admissions applies to people from Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Iran. Except for Iran, the listed countries have unstable governments and are beset with internal conflict from Islamic terror groups. Iran, although it has a stable government, is considered by the U.S. to be a terror-exporting country. The moratorium does not apply, however, to many other countries such as Kenya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Chad that are also engaged in conflicts with Islamic terror groups. Trump’s order also does not apply to most Muslim countries, contrary to false media reports that describe the order as a ban on Muslim immigration.