Which countries have the highest numbers of visa overstays in recent years?
Executive summary
Raw counts of U.S. visa overstays are dominated by large-source countries in Latin America — especially Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia — while the highest overstay percentages are concentrated among smaller-source countries in Africa and parts of Asia; official DHS and Congressional analyses make this split clear and policy debates hinge on whether to target rates or totals [1][2][3]. The U.S. government reports overall overstay rates below 1 percent for FY2024 but still documents hundreds of thousands of individual overstays in recent years, a tension that drives both technical fixes and political responses [4][5].
1. The headline numbers: which countries produce the most overstays by count
When counting the absolute number of suspected overstays, data and secondary summaries point to large-volume sending countries: DHS and analysts show Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia among the top contributors by raw totals, with reporting citing roughly 52,000 Mexican, 43,000 Colombian and very large Venezuelan overstayer figures in recent years — one local news summary placed Venezuelan overstays as high as ~173,000 in certain tallies while other DHS-based tabulations for 2023–2024 show total global overstays in the hundreds of thousands, meaning these countries account for substantial shares of the overall problem [6][1][5]. Congressional Research Service tabulations using DHS data similarly list the ten countries with the highest overstay totals and emphasize that volume is driven by admission counts as much as propensity to stay [2].
2. The different picture: countries with the highest overstay rates (percentages)
A different list emerges when ranking rate — the share of visitors who fail to depart as expected — rather than raw numbers: multiple media and government-derived maps highlight smaller-source nations with very high suspected in‑country overstay rates, including Angola, Liberia, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Cabo Verde and Burkina Faso, and other reporting cites extreme rates for countries such as Chad (around 49%), Laos (34%), Haiti (31%), Republic of Congo (29%) and several others with rates in the 20–50% range in selected years [7][3][8]. These high percentages often reflect small traveler cohorts where a modest number of overstays produces a large rate, a point emphasized by analysts [9].
3. Why totals and rates point at different countries — and why it matters
The apparent contradiction is methodological: totals scale with how many people travel from a country, while rates amplify problems in small cohorts; critics argue that policy responses that focus on high percentages will disproportionately target poor or low-volume countries with few actual overstays in raw terms, whereas a focus on totals would point to a handful of high-travel countries as the practical source of most overstays [5][9]. Center for Global Development analysis notes that countries with very high rates can account for only a sliver of global overstays (for example, several African countries together represented only a few thousand overstays against a global total in the hundreds of thousands), making the choice of metric a political as well as technical decision [5].
4. Policy responses, pilots and political motives
Policymakers have reacted with targeted measures — for example, a State Department/Administration pilot proposing visa bonds for applicants from countries with high overstay rates and a 2025 set of travel restrictions that invoked overstay metrics as part of the rationale — but those moves have drawn criticism that they use percentage-based metrics to justify broad restrictions that will affect diplomatic partners and low-volume travelers [3][8][10]. Reform proposals in Congress include stricter visa adjudication, warnings and departure reminders, and debates continue about whether to prioritize reducing absolute overstays or addressing apparent high rates in specific countries [2][5].
5. Data gaps and caveats: how confident can one be in country rankings?
All authoritative sources warn that the DHS overstay reports are snapshots built on carrier data for air and sea travelers, estimates of “suspected in‑country” overstays, and later adjustments for departures or status changes; DHS reports an overall FY2024 overstay rate near 0.9–1.0 percent and notes high confirmation rates for departures, while outside analysts and watchdogs stress uncertainty in low-volume country estimates and the potential for rates to be inflated by small denominators [4][11][5]. Because of these methodological limits, lists of “highest” countries must be read as two related but distinct answers — highest totals and highest rates — each supported by DHS-derived data but carrying different policy implications [2].
Conclusion
Recent DHS-based reporting and independent analyses converge on a straightforward conclusion: by raw counts the largest contributors to U.S. visa overstays are high-volume sending countries such as Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia, while the highest overstay percentages are concentrated among smaller sending countries — many in Africa and parts of Asia — and the policymaker’s choice of metric (totals vs. rates) determines which nations wind up targeted by reforms or restrictions [1][6][3][8].