And 2% of overstays is a misleading number as that includes all those who enter on legitimate short term tourist visas which we don't hand out easily to countries with a high level of visa overstays, such as Venezuela or Sierra Leone. The people who do generally overstay their visas are those who come on short term work visas like L1, or former students who are no longer enrolled and the Opt 1 expired. Or family members 'visiting' their relatives, who never leave.
> In the U.S., visa overstays have exceeded illegal border crossings in each of the past seven years. In 2016, about 515,000 people arrived in the United States illegally, the Center for Migration Studies said in a report. Of these, 320,000, more than three-fifths, overstayed their visas, and the rest crossed a land border illegally. But tracking people who enter the U.S. legally until they leave is difficult. The Department of Homeland Security conducted its own analysis for fiscal year 2017, and its estimate was 702,000 overstayers. (To be clear, that number is a small fraction, 1.33 percent, of the more than 50 million people who arrive in the U.S. each year on valid visas.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/re...
