The millions of illegal aliens resident in the United States got here primarily through two avenues of neglect, exacerbated by a lack of internal immigration enforcement. Here’s how the system works, and what has changed under Trump.

Many aliens simply walked in across the wide-open southern border. The others, perhaps the majority over the years, were issued legitimate tourist or student visas abroad by a Department of State more concerned with facilitating travel than protecting America. Those illegals simply stayed in America as they pleased, as long as they pleased, doing whatever they pleased, whether that be working out-of-status or, in the extreme case, going to flight school and conducting the attacks of September 11. There was no one to interfere with their plans once a visa was issued and they were admitted to the U.S., because America for decades lacked any form of internal immigration enforcement. Until now, and now everything has finally begun to change.

The system works like this. A Department of State employee abroad at one of our embassies or consulates issues tourist, student, and temporary worker visas. While the terms of those visas are set by law, the standards of adjudication (i.e., who actually gets a visa under a part of the law called 214(b)) are largely determined by mid-level officials at each overseas post. Once issued, the visa is valid, in the case of most tourist visas, for 10 years. That means the person issued that visa can use it to enter the U.S. once or as many times as they like during a 10-year period. There is no further review of circumstances that may change in the person’s life or their home country during those 10 years. There are an estimated 55 million such valid non-immigrant visas in existence in the hands of travelers from Niger to Iran, from China to Russia. In FY 2023, the State Department issued over 10.4 million non-immigrant visas, any holder of which could apply to enter the U.S. As the numbers keep growing exponentially as staffing stays the same, scrutiny inevitably must drop.

The mantra during the 1990s, when I was a visa officer as a young State Department employee, was to issue visas, lots of visas, as conveniently as possible. We were told by our bosses we were not law enforcement and our duty was to facilitate travel. As policy we took full advantage of the ability to waive personal interviews for as much as 40 percent of our clientele. We were trained to overlook certain overstays in the U.S., and to not question or review decisions made by others.

This mania for issuance reached its peak with the Visa Express program. Visa Express was a Washington-sanctioned State Department program in Saudi Arabia that allowed most Saudi nationals to apply for U.S. visas without going in person to a U.S. embassy or consulate for an interview. The idea was to streamline visa processing, since Saudi Arabia generated huge numbers of applications, and in-person interviews were seen as burdensome. Three of the 19 9/11 hijackers got their U.S. visas through Visa Express. Others had gotten their multi-year tourist visas long before. But Visa Express was not an anomaly; most posts overseas had something similar in place. It happened to be Visa Express in Saudi that made 9/11 possible, but it could have been any of us, whispered visa officers globally. It was policy.

Programs like Visa Express were done away with in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, only to creep back a few years later. The Trump administration has now mandated near-100 percent personal interviews once again. Other changes were imposed on a recalcitrant State Department, including a requirement to fingerprint all visa applicants, extensive use of facial recognition technology, and closer liaison with the intelligence agencies. But the prime directive of facilitating travel still remains. It is part of the culture and demands some sort of backup, some sort of internal enforcement.

Once handed his visa, the traveler applies to enter the U.S. at one of hundreds of ports of entry, run until 2001 by the predecessor to Homeland Security, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The visa holder is stamped in for a period of time, typically six months for tourists. A side system exists where people from 41 certain “vetted” countries need no visa at all. In FY 2023, the United States welcomed approximately 18 million visitors to the U.S. under the Visa Waiver Program. Once any of these people left the airport, up to now, almost none had any contact with any form of immigration enforcement, a massive weak spot involving everyone looking the other way as the number of illegal aliens in America grew.

I handled the case of a Syrian man. He entered the U.S. on a tourist visa years earlier, and no one cared that he was obviously not a tourist. He attended community college without a student visa because no one at the college cared, received food stamps for a while, got a driver’s license, upgraded that so he could drive a taxi and work full-time, and eventually bought a house. He even became a notary public in pursuit of his real estate license. At each instance the government officials he encountered did not care that he was an illegal alien, if they even knew. He learned he could do what he wanted in America, that the law meant very little. When I was able to deny him his new visa, he asked me a question that has haunted me ever since: Of all the people, why do you care? (For whatever it’s worth, he married a Syrian-American and got a waiver for his ineligibility.)

One extreme example of time allowed in the U.S. is student visas. Most international students are admitted for “duration of study.” That means as long as they stay in full-time status, as determined by the school or university mind you, not ICE, they can live and work part-time in America. And weep not; many of these “colleges” are run by fellow nationals out of store fronts, offer no classes, but for a fee validate student status. Some students live in the U.S. in “soft” status for a decade or more. (This will soon change to a set, limited time frame under new DHS guidelines.) Other aliens benefit greatly from bogus asylum claims. They are allowed to live and work in the U.S. while the claim grinds through the courts, something a clever lawyer can drag out for years. Then, finally given an order of deportation, under the policy of no internal enforcement, they simply leave the courtroom and resume their illegal life.

At one point the number of illegals grew so high that an amnesty was granted to, for a moment, reset the number to zero. This immigration amnesty was enacted in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, through the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This law offered a pathway to legal permanent residency (and eventually citizenship) for most illegal immigrants who had entered the U.S. before January 1, 1982 and had lived continuously in the country. It also provided legal status to seasonal agricultural workers who had worked a minimum number of days as illegals in America. It had the foreseeable but unexpected consequence of reshaping Latino communities, especially in California, Texas, and the Southwest, with long-lasting political and social effects.

But employer sanctions in the IRCA were weakly enforced under the no internal enforcement policy, and unauthorized hiring continued. Border enforcement ramped up somewhat, but without creating new legal entry channels for low-wage workers, and without any internal enforcement of immigration law against the new batch of illegal entrants who snuck through, undocumented migration resumed as usual.

Under Trump, things have changed. One of the most significant backstops to so many visas being issued abroad and then promptly forgotten about is a new plan to review the more than 55 million people who have valid U.S. visas for any violations that could lead to deportation. The State Department said all U.S. visa-holders, to include tourists and students, are now subject to “continuous vetting,” with an eye toward any indication they could be ineligible for permission to enter or stay in the United States. If such information is found, the visa will be revoked, and if the visa-holder is in the United States, he would be subject to deportation.

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The pre-Trump eras reflect how U.S. immigration law was often little more than symbolic. Before Trump, the United States pursued immigration enforcement policies concentrating on border security while neglecting the nation’s interior. Both Democrats and Republicans tolerated the presence of millions of illegal aliens, balancing weak enforcement with political and economic considerations. 

Since Trump's second administration came into power, the most obvious change in immigration policy is the current campaign by ICE to locate and deport aliens in the United States illegally. This summer storm has been a long time coming. This is a step that the flaccid immigration system demanded for decades, as local, state, and Federal authorities turned a blind eye toward illegals walking free out of court rooms, walking free from prisons, and living any life they chose, good or bad, in America. There is no other country in the world so lax on internal immigration enforcement, and the time has come to play catch-up on the millions of cases allowed by so many officials to be in America.

It isn’t authoritarianism or fascism; it is enforcing laws on the books for decades for the first time.