The rules say that a green card holder can lose his status if he stays out of the US for a period longer than a year.
The question is, how does US immigration know how long the person has stayed out of the country. If the person leaves the country, does his passport get a date stamp of exit and entry?
I am a Canadian citizen, and I know that my passport does not get stamped when I travel to the US, and I think it is the same for US citizens travelling to Canada. Are green card holders treated differently at the border because they do not carry an actual US passport? Does their passport from their home country get a stamp of exit and entry?
Disclaimer - I am not asking this question to find ways of subverting any law. Just curious.
I believe the passports get scanned and the information is kept in the Immigration database, not on the passport itself. But yes, they track your movement in and out of the country.
Are you sure about this? Storing this information for every person leaving/entering the country would require massive storage capacity. Querying it with OLTP seems to be quite difficult.
I tend to believe that the scan of the passport is done and queried against a database that has only those that have been flagged. The latter would be a smaller set to query and perhaps possible while the traveler waits at customs.
Passports definitely get scanned (although it used to be that the scanning was not so consistent). I’ve done FOIA requests for clients’ entry records. Entry records are more reliable than exit records, and air travel records are much more reliable than land travel records. Also, before most people had machine-readable passports, records were much spottier. But these days they’re pretty good.
I work in security software for very large commercial systems. Trust me when I say the entry and exit records for people in the US is actually pretty small compared to a large data system. It’s also not that large since there’s not a huge amount a data recorded for each entry/exit.
Considering the amount of data stored for tracking phone calls, emails, flight records, etc. - entry information is trivial. There’s probably more data stored in the intial passport application than in a few years of a typical person’s entry and exit information. Data storage tech is incredible today.
Have you been off the continent for over a year? Sounds like your green card should be revoked.
Have you not heard that the US government has been capturing cell phone data for all cell phone calls made. If they have enough storage space for all of that data, they can carve out a few servers to store the international travelers entry and exit data.
They don’t really care, unless they have a particular reason to check. Keep your head down, and it won’t get shot off. If they do become suspicious, they can ask you for proof or evidence that you were in compliance.
I am a Canadian citizen and have nothing to do with the process followed in the US. I am just curious to know how the immigration authorities keep a tab on when a person enters/exits the US to enforce the rules for people with permanent residency status(green card holders). As a citizen I know one can stay out of the country for longer periods.
[QUOTE=Eva Luna]
Passports definitely get scanned
[/QUOTE]
I am aware and I am not arguing the point that passports get scanned. My question is only on what happens when the passport gets scanned at the point of entry/exit.
Whenever I have been through immigration, the officer has taken my passport, scanned it on a reader in front of him, looked at the terminal for a few seconds and handed me back my passport. If it was not for the other questions that he/she generally ask, the scanning and feedback process takes no longer than 5 seconds perhaps.
Does the information system validate the passport number with all the records in the database and come up with the past entry/exit record of the passport scanned within the typical time frame of less than say 5 to 10 seconds?
[QUOTE=Omar Little]
Have you not heard that the US government has been capturing cell phone data for all cell phone calls made.
[/QUOTE]
I am not denying this. Capturing information for retrieval when required is not the same as the online transaction that happens at a port of entry terminal.
At a guess how many people must be entering/exiting a country like the US on any given day?
Assuming the US immigration database system is vaguely similar to the system where I live*…
I can see the history of entries and exits of a person on our immigration database, among other things. Each new entry has very basic information: point of entry, airline and flight #, date, and whether it was an entry or exit.
The difficulty the US would have is the lack of formal immigration control upon exiting the country, particularly with departures by land or sea. The USCIS could take passenger manifests for international flight from the airlines as a record of exit, but that is inexact.
I live on a Caribbean island so (discounting cruise ship passengers) essentially all of our entries/exits are via airline. Presumably land border or sea entries/exits would be just a different point of entry.
While I don’t know what is actually done by passport control in practice, the data handling required really is absolutely trivial, as others have said. If the entire population of the U.S. took ten overseas trips every year, the data so generated would fit on a thumb drive from Best Buy. Accessing such quantities of data remotely, on demand, is just not a technological challenge at all.
BAsed on my wife’s experience. Green card holders need to physically enter the US every 6 months in the post 9-11 world to avoid problems. Definitely need to enter within one calendar year of last departure.
Or you can get a re-entry permit.
Basically, a green card was not designed for people to live outside of the US.
IIRC, the sheet you fill in as a returning U resident on an airline includes “ow long have you been out of th counry?”
I suppose you could lie, that brings its own collection of problems probably more serious than outlasting your residence time.
Also, you could fly to Tijuana or Vancouver BC or Toronto and drive into the USA, but again border guards while processing your passport typically ask “how long have you been out of the country?”
I recall hearing of Canadians who spent the winter in Florida, and if they accidentally overstayed their 180-day limit for visitors were is serious trouble, denied re-entry if the border guards wanted to be difficult. Presumably, the USA and Canada share some border-crossing data?