U.S. immigration data is on paper and a mess, says report

The U.S. government spends $8o billion a year on information technology, but despite this money, its immigration data is in awful shape. Some data is on paper, or of poor quality and out of synch with government systems used to track wages and employment.

Those are some of the takeaways from a new report that conducted what amounts to a headcount of nonimmigrant visa workers in the U.S. In the course of this investigation, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) critiqued the information-gathering systems used by the government.

"It's just sort of scandalous how poorly we're keeping track of what's going on in the visa programs," said Daniel Costa, the EPI's director of immigration law and policy research, in an interview. The report found that the data was inadequate and recorded in an inconsistent manner across federal agencies.

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