Does DHS Need an Exit System?

In a House hearing on Wednesday about a proposed plan for collection of non-citizens’ biometric data upon exit from the United States, assistant professor Nathan Sales of George Mason University School of Law made an interesting observation: “Frankly, exit controls are less vital than entry controls. It’s more important to know if we’re keeping [terrorists] out, than to know if they left.”

Sales argued that both an entry and an exit system improve security by tracking foreign visitors in the United States, but his initial point raises some interesting questions about the allocation of program funds.

The Homeland Security Department already has spent millions of dollars on the US VISIT program to develop and test a system for checking visitors' identities when they enter and exit the country. (The airlines estimate it will cost $12.3 billion over 10 years to finish and maintain the exit portion of the system.) So far, no proposed procedures satisfy DHS, Congress, the airline industry or other private sector stakeholders. The proposals are either too expensive or they just don’t work.

What no one on the Hill will consider seriously, however, is whether an exit system is even worthwhile. Certainly, an exit system would provide DHS and the intelligence community a second chance, so to speak, to track down potentially dangerous people. But funds are scarce, and the federal government is not equipped to mitigate all existing security risks. There’s the need to prioritize.

Once terrorists get into the country, how likely are they to leave? And if they do, should that be the concern, or should the focus instead be on efforts to figure out how these individuals managed to enter in the first place? Could dollars allocated to an exit system perhaps be better spent improving security in other areas even, such as cargo transport and foreign intelligence? One has to wonder whether any of these questions has been seriously considered.

Often government pursues initiatives because they seem a logical next step, or because they happen to be mandated by a particular piece of legislation. Sometimes these initiatives are well thought out and prove worth the time and money, but other times a closer look reveals that the return on investment is not worthwhile, no matter how much technology is thrown in the mix. Consider the Census debacle, for example.

Should the exit portion of the US-VISIT program be scrapped? The answer is up for debate, but the question is at least worth asking.