By Sean O’Driscoll

The U.S. system for catching people who overstay visitor visas is totally inefficient, a major new report has found.

The report, a good read for undocumented immigrants looking for security flaws, found that out of 142,816 leads on suspected overstays during 2004, only 4,164 cases were referred to immigration field officers and just 671 undocumented were captured.

While the government’s post-September 11 National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) has stopped millions of undocumented from taking the risk of going home, a new report shows that it is still also riddled with flaws and security breaches.

The report, released this week by Homeland Security Department Inspector General Richard Skinner, looked at the systems used by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its enforcement division, called the Compliance Enforcement Unit (CEU).

The report found that the CEU only had a “minimal impact” on reducing the number of overstays because of deficiencies in the system.

The unit acts on tip-offs on violations of the U.S. Visit, Student and Exchange Visitor programs, as well as NSEERS. Other sources of leads include visa revocations by the State Department.

In 2004, CEU received more than 300,000 violator leads from those programs, according to the report issued by Skinner.

The lack of an exit-control database within U.S. Visit system is one of the biggest problems, the report found.

Those hoping to escape authorities even after they have been “referred” (i.e. caught) seem to have a good chance. Of 14,000 referrals examined in the report, 49% had not been processed by the CEU after two months. The time lag allowed many immigrants to change their addresses, the report found.

Meanwhile, the number of Irish people applying for the annual green card lottery has plunged more than a third, the executive director of Emerald Isle Immigration Center has said.

Siobhan Dennehy, who has organized workshops and applications at the center’s offices in the Bronx and Woodside, said that restrictions on leaving the U.S. have left many undocumented afraid to go back to Ireland to complete the process if they win a green card.

“Many feel that there is no real point in applying because they are not going to be able to go back to Ireland to get the green card anyway,” she said.

Dennehy said that the numbers applying at both Emerald Isle offices were down significantly from 300 to 400 last year and 500 the previous year, when the new online-only green card lottery was introduced.

Dennehy said that the people applying for the lottery this year were split equally between documented and undocumented.

Some of the documented wanted to change their type of visa and thought that winning was an easy way of getting what they wanted, she said.