Visa vandals

The Lincoln Memorial, the Washington National Cathedral and other monuments in the nation's capital have fallen victim to lax immigration policies. Police charged a 58-year-old Chinese woman with a paint can china visa application form, who wasn't supposed to be in the country, with vandalism.Federal immigration officials say only that Jiamei Tian came to the United States on a short-term tourist visa, which expired about the time the paint flew. Ms. Tian was living in a park downtown Washington two blocks from the White House when she was arrested, and she has been confined to a halfway house. She got her name in the newspapers, but she's far from alone in overstaying her we'e.

The Government Accountability Office says the Homeland Security Department has lost track of more than 1 million foreigners here on tourist, work and student visas. The executive branch is required to tell Congress how many people have overstayed their visas, but it never does because nobody in the government knows. The current policy amounts to, "You can check in any time, but you don't have to leave."The government is woefully behind on deploying a new monitoring system to better track the'ings and — even more important china travel visa requirements — goings of foreign visitors.

A 1996 immigration-reform bill required the government to create a departure tracking system, a request repeated in 2004. Nearly a decade later, the Department of Homeland Security "has not yet fulfilled the 2004 statutory requirement to implement a biometric exit capability," GAO investigators found. Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano told the Senate earlier this year that the department would report the progress of the development of the new system in December, but the GAO says Homeland Security officials don't yet know how they intend to go about building such a system or making the required report. No one should expect to see anything substantial until 2016 at the earliest.