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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is part of the effort to detect visa overstayers. CBP tries to measure this.[1] As of the end of 2015, they estimate that there are 416,500 people in the US who overstayed their visa. They want to use the same identification techniques at entry and exit and match them. This tells them who's entered the US legally but now needs to be found and deported.

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY%2015...

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But why do we want to identify visa overstayers who are leaving the country? That doesn't do us any good. You could argue that we're doing it to prohibit them from re-entering, but the vast majority of our illegal immigration are people who come here with no intention of leaving and thus will never be found on a jet bridge. Likewise, it obviously won't do much for terrorism prevention, because those people tend to leave the country contemporaneously with leaving the earth.

It seems to me that there are far more compelling reasons to implement exit controls if you have other, less savory motives.

It is with the hope that the penalties from getting caught will encourage people to comply with the limit of stay terms of their visa.

I've lived outside of the USA for most of my adult life and from the people I've interacted with, anecdotally, the threat that if they overstay their visa they'll be fined <insert large number here> per day and be denied a visa & entry in the future seems to motivate people to comply with the terms of their visa.

Sure, but when you threaten fines against Jose from Guatemala who walked into this country with nothing more than what he carried on his back, and has been working a minimum wage job here for the last 10 years trying to support a family... you're accomplishing nothing. The bottom line is that if you have money, you can get yourself a valid visa, and if you don't, a fine won't exactly be effective.

If GP is correct, I would think that the point is not to detect departures by people who have overstayed but to more reliably detect all departures, so we can more accurately figure out who has not departed, but should have.

But that's just silly, given that you can easily leave the country by walking across the border. Even if they implement this for every international plane departure, the data will still be massively incomplete.

>you can easily leave the country by walking across the border

which is of course illegal...

I don't know where you got the idea that it is illegal to leave the country on foot, but you are mistaken.

There are vehicle and foot ports of entry all along the border, where legal passage between countries can be done.

Walk up to the checkpoint, do the security thing, and keep walking. Easy peasy.

Of course, but the parent comment didn't say that.

If they're going to implement this, obviously they're going to implement it at every border crossing for it to be of any use whatsoever...

The parent comment also didn't not say that. You could as easily say, being exactly non-specific as that comment, that it's illegal to fly across the border. Because it is, if you don't go through procedures on both ends.

Don't get me wrong: I don't support this. But I believe the fact that "you can easily leave the country by walking across the border" is also something the current administration would like to "correct." I can imagine this technology being installed at land crossings as well.

Assuming the facial recognition actually works. My base assumption is that this is a make-work for someone's friend, a contract that is continuous rather than for the Super Bowl or other single event.

Definitely it's the more likely assumption that simple cronyism is at play rather the unfolding plot of a dystopian novel. I'm not sure that it's the safe assumption though.

I've been thinking: you know what would be a beneficial use of image recognition? Trash dumps. Find out what brands aren't recycled when they should be, and penalize them.

In a society that would function to minimize waste rather than maximize it as a route to increased consumption, that would be a brilliant way to enforce sanity.

> If GP is correct, I would think that the point is not to detect departures by people who have overstayed but to more reliably detect all departures, so we can more accurately figure out who has not departed, but should have.

You don't need facial recognition for that, just passport data and passenger manifests. People who didn't break the law aren't going to be evading detection when they buy an airline ticket out of the country.

https://www.cbp.gov/travel/international-visitors/i-94-instr...

> CBP now gathers travelers’ arrival/departure information automatically from their electronic travel records. Because advance information is only transmitted for air and sea travelers, CBP will still issue a paper form I-94 at land border ports of entry.

> but the vast majority of our illegal immigration are people who come here with no intention of leaving

That's the intention but unless they brought all their family over they'd probably find a need to leave at some point. So preventing re-entry is a plausible cause.

> obviously won't do much for terrorism prevention, because those people tend to leave the country contemporaneously with leaving the earth.

Unless their plot fails and they are trying to escape and regroup. Now how many of those failed plots that we were about to catch them but they escaped have we solved recently. I can't think of any.

Working with the government for a bit, I would say when stuff like this comes about, the reasons are usually more more about money. Something like a a company lobbied to get a large hundred million dollar contract to implement this. And it just happens that the head of DHS is first cousin with the CEO of said company.

> That's the intention but unless they brought all their family over they'd probably find a need to leave at some point

With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. If you overstay a visa, you're going to stay in the country no matter what. I know folks who have missed family funerals because of that.

Especially once you realize you can get married and have children who are citizens. This is why amnesty is a huge deal for lots of folks.

> With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. If you overstay a visa, you're going to stay in the country no matter what.

How is overstaying a visa a necessary requirement for staying in the country no matter what. Some people might just make mistakes and come clean and explain what they did. Some might hope to get lucky. Maybe some are extra sneaky and want to borrow a passport from one of their cousins (but that biometrics checks though it making it tricky these days).

> I know folks who have missed family funerals because of that.

So they snuck in on a tourist visa, lied about the purpose and then never left missing their mother's or father's funeral even?

> This is why amnesty is a huge deal for lots of folks.

You think this very common and now after they snuck in they want amnesty? Well I can certainly see that. But I can also see why a lot of Americans might not want to give them amnesty as well. Last year 2.5M people were deported that will probably continue.

> I know folks who have missed family funerals because of that.

Well tell your folks to stay put and especially stay away from anywhere near a border. People have been deported just by boarding an inter-city bus. Because it was stopped and searched by immigration officers.

Don't even go outside.[1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/fewer-immig...

> That's the intention but unless they brought all their family over they'd probably find a need to leave at some point.

No, they won't. If the overstay was on purpose, you can bet they are not leaving no matter what.

> So preventing re-entry is a plausible cause.

Which is something that's already done. When you leave, the airline reports that information(if by plane, no idea about other methods). It is a flawed system, but skewed against the individuals, as the airline may fail to report (not sure how often this happens).

I was actually scared the first time I left the US, because there was no exit stamp. I had only been to countries which stamp your passport when you leave.

If you are using the system for this purpose, you're using it to replace a cheap stamp, plus human verification.

There's the consequences that might scare others into not overstaying. You may also be able to gain information from them that you could use to find others who aren't physically leaving the country.

It's of course completely possible that there are unsavory and foul motives at work. It's also possible that there are things other than mass human rights violations that such a system might be useful for.

> But why do we want to identify visa overstayers who are leaving the country?

Who said all of them were leaving the country?

> They want to use the same identification techniques at entry and exit and match them.

The US doesn't even try to have general exit controls, though, and the routes of egress that DHS has the kind of presence at to implement facial recognition ar already have supposedly positive identification procedures for what is theoretically more critical and immediate security purposes in place, making facial recognition at those locations a very low value in improving ability to narrow down potential visa overstays.

Which isn't to say this isn't the reason, just that it's a very poor reason.

It seems to me that this would have to have a very high level of accuracy and reliability though. Visa overstays amount to a very small portion of total entry and exit, so if there is even a small false negative rate, ICE agents will be spending a lot of time looking for people who have already left the country.

As the report notes, though, they already have exit information from passenger manifests, and land border entry sharing from Canada and Mexico. I would have assumed this information would have already been sufficiently accurate.

Although Canada now reports land (and ferry) arrivals to the US, Mexico does not (yet).

There is no US record of who leaves southbound into Mexico, and in most cases Mexico doesn't have a record of their entry either (requiring a Mexico tourist permit isn't enforced at most entry points).

Fair enough. But it sounds like this technology is being developed for airports, not land crossings or ferries. How would you setup this facial scanning when people leave the country in a vehicle?

That's the number of overstays among 2015 arrivals as of January 2016, not the total number of overstays.

I guess the numbers for longer overstays will be lower, it'd be interesting to see the estimates.

If that was truly their intention, then I should simply be able to present a US passport and walk by.

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