When people picture an undocumented immigrant, they usually don’t picture a Spanish tourist in Brickell or a British visitor who never flew home. But the government’s own numbers say there are a lot of them. Every year, tens of thousands of Europeans come to the U.S. legally on tourist visas and stay past the date they were supposed to leave.
And almost none of them get deported. Here’s what the federal data actually shows, and why it matters in a city like Miami, where immigration arrests are now among the highest in the country.
How many Europeans overstay their U.S. visas?
Most Western Europeans visit under the Visa Waiver Program, which lets them stay up to 90 days without a visa. The Department of Homeland Security tracks who leaves on time. In fiscal 2023, according to its overstay report to Congress, these were the European countries with the most visitors still believed to be in the U.S. after their time ran out:
- Spain: 18,192
- United Kingdom: 13,816
- France: 8,456
- Italy: 7,265
- Germany: 5,289
- Portugal: 3,425
The fiscal 2024 report shows the same pattern: about 61,000 suspected overstays from European visa-waiver countries in a single year, led again by Spain (13,078) and the U.K. (10,828). Those figures count only business and tourist visitors who arrived by air or sea. They don’t include students, workers or people from countries outside the program, like Russia, Ukraine or Albania.
Overstays aren’t a side issue. The Center for Migration Studies estimates that in fiscal 2023, almost 40% of people who became undocumented did it by overstaying a visa, not by crossing the border.
How many Europeans actually get deported?
Very few. In fiscal 2023, the most recent year in DHS’s official yearbook, the government formally removed 183,360 people. Just 1,540 were European, less than 1%. Compare each country’s removals with its overstays the same year:
- Spain: 160 removed, against 18,192 suspected overstays.
- United Kingdom: 170 removed, against 13,816.
- Italy: 90 removed, against 7,265.
- France: 40 removed, against 8,456.
- Germany: 40 removed, against 5,289.
- For comparison, Guatemala: 20,200 removed. Honduras: 22,210.
Two honest caveats. Some overstayers leave on their own later, so the overstay counts shrink over time, and DHS’s removal numbers include people caught at the border, which is where most Central Americans are stopped. But even allowing for both, the gap is enormous.
What does this have to do with Miami?
Miami is now ground zero for interior enforcement. Axios reported in April that ICE’s Miami office leads the country in arrests, driven by local police cooperation under so-called 287(g) agreements. Enforcement that runs through local police finds the people police run into on the street. It rarely finds someone who arrived through Terminal D on a 90-day visa waiver and never gets pulled over.
Overstayers aren’t all low-wage workers, either. In May, federal prosecutors in Miami indicted a 19-year-old who they say overstayed a visitor visa and used a $13 million crypto fraud to lease luxury cars, buy jewelry and fund a lavish Miami nightlife. He’s Canadian, not European, but the case shows how an overstayer can live in plain sight in Miami for months. Investigators caught him for the fraud, not the overstay.
The BeezLoop Take
There’s no evidence that undocumented Europeans commit more crime than anyone else, and it wouldn’t be fair to claim it. Most overstayers of every nationality are people who simply didn’t leave. That’s the point. The law they’re breaking is the same one a Honduran roofer is breaking.
What the numbers show is who the enforcement system is built to find. It’s built around the border and around traffic stops in working neighborhoods. It barely touches people who fly in legally, overstay quietly and blend into neighborhoods where nobody pulls them over. Spain alone had 18,192 suspected overstays in one year. DHS hasn’t removed more than 2,500 Europeans in any year of the past decade.
If immigration enforcement is really about the rule of law, it should apply the same way to a tourist from Madrid as to a worker from Tegucigalpa. Right now it doesn’t, and nobody running the system seems interested in explaining why.
The open question: if visa overstays are close to 40% of new undocumented immigration, why does almost all of the enforcement happen somewhere else?
Also on BeezLoop: Only 27% of Latino voters approve of Trump, and 31% now carry ID because of ICE.
Related: A Boston appeals court says ICE has to tell people which country it’s deporting them to.
Sources: DHS Entry/Exit Overstay Report FY2023 · DHS Entry/Exit Overstay Report FY2024 · DHS Yearbook, Table 42 (removals by nationality) · Center for Migration Studies · Axios Miami · Local 10
