More than 20 years had elapsed since the US government estimated how many people entered the country legally and overstayed their visas.
The updated numbers, finally published in January, were sobering.
The Homeland Security Department said 527,127 people who were supposed to leave the country in the 2015 fiscal year overstayed, more than the population of Atlanta. And that was only those who entered by plane or ship, not on land.
To put that in perspective, the Border Patrol made 337,117 arrests of people entering the country illegally during the same period, nearly all on the border with Mexico. More people overstayed visas than were caught crossing the border illegally.
An estimated 40 per cent of the 11.4 million people in the US illegally overstayed visas, a crucial but often overlooked fact in the immigration debate.
That percentage may grow as India and China replace Mexico as the largest senders of immigrants to the United States. Mexicans have long entered illegally through deserts of California, Arizona and Texas but the absence of a shared border makes that route unlikely for Asians.
Overstays accounted for about 1 per cent of 45 million visitors on business and tourist visas from October 2014 to September 2015, according to the long-awaited Homeland Security report.
Canada occupied the top slot for overstays, followed by Mexico, Brazil, Germany and Italy. The United Kingdom, Colombia, China, India and Venezuela rounded out the top 10.
The Pew Research Center said last year that more Mexicans were leaving the United States than coming, ending one of biggest immigration waves in US history.
Lack of jobs for unskilled labor after the Great Recession is widely cited as a reason but border enforcement played a part.
The Border Patrol more than quintupled to 21,444 agents in 2011 from 4,028 in 1993.
The US erected fences along about 650 miles of border with Mexico, nearly all of it in the final years of George W Bush's administration. Last year, Border Patrol arrests one gauge of illegal crossings fell to the lowest level since 1971.
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