[ashray]

It's well known that people often lie on visa applications and try to immigrate illegally. The US publishes a yearly review of overstayers broken down by country of origin. So you can see where the highest problem areas are. Sometimes this is masked because of way stricter visa issuance policies. So for example, you may not see a super high overstay percentage for India because many folks get rejected at the visa application stage. But still, this gives you a clearer picture of how rampant the lying is and the subsequent "disappearing" in the US.

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-08/25_0826_cbp_...

I can't address your other concerns about economic impact etc. I'm not sure if there is a negative economic impact from this.

[motbus3]

That is an interesting document. I did not know about it. I will say that the absolute numbers are higher than I expect, but the relative numbers are around the ballpark of 1%. And depending what is counted maybe ~2% which seems to me that the problem itself is not as big as it seems to me people are making it to appear. It does not seem to be foreigners are trying to overtake or abuse the country systematically as the it has been said by some. Is my reading of the situation same as yours?

[ashray]

So for Visa Waiver countries one of the requirements is to keep that number under 1% or so to stay in the visa waiver program. For visa required countries, if the visa vetting process wasn't so strict, probably the numbers would be a lot higher.