The United States Department of Homeland Security reported that in Fiscal Year 2024, 427,204 foreign nationals remained in the country beyond their authorised period of admission. This figure, drawn from a total of 46.6 million expected departures, represents a compliance rate of 99.08 per cent. More than 99 in every 100 visitors left on time or lawfully adjusted their immigration status. The rate of non-compliance, at less than one per cent, was lower than the staff attrition rate of many of the corporations whose executives lobby most vocally for stricter immigration enforcement. By any rational policy metric, this is a functioning system performing close to its theoretical maximum.

By June 2025, the same data had been used to justify entry bans on nationals of 19 countries, overwhelmingly in sub-Saharan Africa, with further restrictions imposed on 24 nations by December 2025. The countries targeted accounted for less than 0.3 per cent of all visa overstays in 2023, according to analysis by the Centre for Global Development. The countries responsible for the largest absolute volumes of overstays were not on the list. This is not a policy error. It is a policy choice, and understanding that choice is essential to understanding how administrative voids in immigration systems have been converted into the most powerful organising tool available to nationalist movements across the democratic world.

The administrative void

Every modern immigration system contains a structural gap between the rules it writes and the information it can verify. The departure of a visitor from a country is vastly harder to track than their arrival. Airports capture arrivals comprehensively through document checks. Departures, particularly by land border or through systems without exit scanning, are captured imperfectly or not at all. The DHS has acknowledged in its own overstay reports that the data conflates actual overstays with unrecorded departures, and that problems with its Arrival and Departure Information System in correctly identifying individuals who changed immigration status inside the country render the figures systematically imprecise.

This administrative void is a genuine governance problem. It means that states cannot reliably distinguish between a visitor who overstayed their visa, a visitor who departed without their exit being recorded, and a visitor who lawfully changed status to a student or worker visa. All three categories appear identical in the raw data. The policy response to this ambiguity ought to be investment in exit tracking infrastructure, data-sharing agreements with airlines and seaports, and targeted bilateral engagement with countries whose nationals show consistently elevated non-compliance rates in verified data.

What has happened instead, with increasing momentum since 2016 and with particular acceleration since 2024, is that nationalist governments and far-right political movements have seized on the administrative void not as a governance problem to be solved but as a political resource to be exploited. The imprecision of the data becomes an asset. If the numbers are uncertain, they can be framed as anything. If the categories are ambiguous, they can be conflated. If the administrative gap cannot be closed without significant investment and international cooperation, it can instead be converted into a permanent source of anxiety, a wound in the body politic that is more useful open than healed.

The nativist machinery

The political weaponisation of visa overstay data follows a consistent architecture across Western democracies. Raw overstay figures are presented without the compliance context that would immediately reveal their statistical insignificance. A headline stating that 500,000 people overstayed their visas in the United States in 2024 produces a different public response than the accurate statement that 99.08 per cent of all visitors left on time. The first formulation suggests a system in crisis. The second describes a system functioning well. Political actors who benefit from a narrative of crisis consistently choose the first.

Overstay rates are disaggregated by country of origin and applied to predetermined political conclusions. The Trump administration in its June 2025 and December 2025 travel ban proclamations set thresholds of 9.5 per cent for visitor visa overstays and 15 per cent for student visa overstays, then used those thresholds to justify restrictions on nationals of 40 countries, the overwhelming majority in Africa and the Muslim-majority world. Countries that exceeded these thresholds but were politically inconvenient to ban were not banned. Belarus, whose visitor visa overstay rate in recent DHS data stood at 9.05 per cent, was not included. Russia, at 7.51 per cent, was not included. Chad, with a visitor visa overstay rate of 49 per cent in 2023, was included not for its overstay rate but for security grounds, while several African military junta states with comparable or worse security profiles were omitted. The selection principle is not the stated one. The stated principle is overstay rates. The actual principle is geopolitical convenience combined with racial and religious targeting dressed in the language of administrative compliance.

The Islamophobia dimension

The conflation of immigration non-compliance with terrorism and Islamic extremism is not an accident of rhetoric. It is the structural mechanism through which Islamophobia is inserted into mainstream migration governance. When the United States government's official proclamation cited, in the same document, both a country's overstay rate and the presence of "radical Islamic terrorist groups," it performed a specific ideological function: it made the Muslim identity of the migrants from that country relevant to an administrative question about visa compliance, for which their religious identity is entirely irrelevant.

This conflation has been reproduced across Europe with remarkable consistency. In the United Kingdom, the riots that erupted in August 2024, in Southport, in Liverpool, in Rotherham, and across more than 30 towns and cities, began from a specific act of disinformation: social media users falsely identified the perpetrator of a knife attack on children as a Muslim asylum seeker. He was a British-born teenager. The misinformation spread faster than the correction. The riots that followed were not, in any meaningful sense, a response to immigration. They were a response to a lie about immigration, distributed deliberately through social media ecosystems built to amplify outrage, and they produced coordinated attacks on mosques, hotels housing asylum seekers, and the businesses of people who looked like they might be immigrants regardless of their actual status.

The Brennan Centre for Justice confirmed that the Trump administration's student visa threshold of 15 per cent, which it applied to justify sweeping in additional African countries, specifically targeted Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Niger, Cote d'Ivoire, and Uganda, countries it had not been able to capture under the visitor visa rate threshold alone. Ghana is not a Muslim-majority country. Nigeria is approximately equally divided between Christians and Muslims. The religious framing is inconsistently applied, but the geographic and racial targeting is consistent throughout: sub-Saharan African nations and Muslim-majority nations bear the greatest burden of restrictions grounded in data that does not withstand scrutiny.

The European pattern

In the United Kingdom, Reform UK secured 4.1 million votes in the 2024 general election, the largest vote share ever recorded by a far-right party in British history. Analysis by Muslim Engagement and Development documented that central to Reform's political appeal was the explicit weaponisation of immigration, Islamophobia, and national identity, with social media strategies that dominated political discourse during the election period and messaging that attributed national decline to immigrants and minorities. By May 2025, the party was polling at approximately 30 per cent nationally, ahead of both established parties.

Across Europe, the pattern has been reproduced with local variation but structural consistency. Germany's Alternative for Germany received double its previous vote share, achieved historic results in state elections, and remained under domestic intelligence surveillance following a court ruling in May 2024 that classified it as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation. Belgium, Croatia, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Slovakia all had right-wing parties in government or supporting ruling coalitions by 2025. France's National Rally achieved its best parliamentary results in 2024. Austria's Freedom Party won 29.1 per cent of the national vote in September 2024.

Across all of these movements, the analytical literature confirms a consistent strategy: economic insecurity, housing pressures, and declining public services are attributed not to policy failures of incumbent governments but to the presence of immigrants and minorities. The administrative void in immigration enforcement, the gap between the rules that theoretically govern who enters and stays and the capacity of the state to verify compliance, is cited as evidence of state failure, of elite indifference, and of the replacement of the native population by external others. The Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which posits a deliberate demographic substitution of white Europeans by non-white immigrants, has moved from the extremist fringe to the speaking platforms of mainstream political events, amplified by billionaire-owned social media platforms whose algorithmic architectures reward outrage.

The cost of weaponisation

The economic cost of the weaponisation of visa overstay data is measurable and significant. The American Immigration Council calculated that households from the 36 countries subject to potential US travel bans who arrived in 2022 generated $1.4 billion in income, paid $359.9 million in taxes, and held $1 billion in spending power. Nigeria and Ghana together accounted for approximately 43 per cent of arrivals from those countries. The travel ban does not remove the threat of overstaying. It removes the contribution of the many to prevent the administrative non-compliance of the few, among a population whose overall compliance rate is, again, over 99 per cent.

The human cost is less easily quantified but no less real. A student from Accra whose visa application is declined because Ghana's student visa overstay rate exceeds an arbitrarily set threshold is being punished for a statistical category they did not create and cannot control. The Southport rioters who attacked a mosque in a community in which no asylum seeker had committed the act they were told justified their violence caused harm that cannot be measured in any administrative dataset. The Ghanaian professional living in London who was told by a Reform UK activist to "go back where they came from" during the summer 2024 riots had her status in the country she has legally made her home challenged not by any administrative finding but by a political movement that has found in migration policy the most productive source of electoral energy currently available in British politics.

What rational governance requires

The gap between how immigration non-compliance is measured and how it is politically exploited can only be closed through the kind of evidence-based institutional response that nationalist movements are, by design, hostile to. Exit tracking infrastructure, biometric confirmation at departure points, data-sharing agreements between immigration authorities and airlines, and targeted bilateral engagement with high non-compliance source countries are costly, technically complex, and administratively slow. They are precisely the interventions that would address the administrative void that nationalist parties prefer to keep open.

The alternative, which is to set arbitrary numerical thresholds, apply them selectively to geopolitically convenient targets, conflate administrative non-compliance with terrorism, and use the resulting political heat to drive electoral mobilisation, is not an immigration policy. It is the administrative apparatus of prejudice. The difference between the two is not one of political preference. It is one of honesty about what the data actually shows and what it is actually being used to do. What the data shows is 99 per cent compliance. What it is being used to do is something else entirely.

About the author

Dominic Senayah is an International Relations professional and policy analyst based in England, specialising in African political economy, humanitarian governance, and migration diplomacy. He holds an MA in International Relations from the UK and writes on trade policy, institutional reform, and Ghana-UK relations for audiences across Africa, the United Kingdom, and the wider Global South.

References

American Immigration Council (2025). Trump's 2025 Travel Ban: Who Is Affected and What It Could Cost the U.S. Economy. Washington, DC: AIC.

Brennan Centre for Justice (2025). Trump's Entry Bans Aren't Really About National Security. New York: NYU School of Law.

Centre for Global Development (2025). Do US Visa Restrictions Target Overstays or Poor Countries? Washington DC: CGD.

Council on Foreign Relations (2026). A Guide to the Countries on Trump's Travel Ban List. New York: CFR.

Global Human Rights Defence (2025). The Rise of Anti-Immigration Sentiments in Europe: Tracing the Roots of the Backlash. The Hague: GHRD.

Mixed Migration Centre (2025). The Far-Right and Migration Politics in the Aftermath of the 2024 Year of Elections. Geneva: MMC.

Muslim Engagement and Development (2025). Reform UK and the Rising Threat to Muslims and Minorities in Britain. London: MEND.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2025). Entry/Exit Overstay Report, Fiscal Year 2024. Washington, DC: DHS / CBP.

The White House (2025). Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Further Restricts and Limits the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the Security of the United States. Washington DC.