TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- The tears well up in Velia Johana Castro's eyes as she repeats what the consular officer told her just minutes earlier.

"He said, 'You didn't qualify yesterday, you don't qualify today, and you won't qualify tomorrow,'" Castro, 19, says in Spanish, as her fiance, Jose Eduardo Alvarez, 21, kisses her forehead and pulls her into his arms.

The young couple from Guasave, Sinaloa, say they wanted to visit Velia's aunt and uncle in Ontario, Calif., for a honeymoon following their February wedding.

But in the eyes of the consular officer in Hermosillo, Sonora, in Mexico, they didn't present a compelling enough case - through bank accounts, property ownership, social and family ties - to convince him they would return to Mexico afterward. Officers are trained to assume every applicant intends to overstay a tourist visa to live and work in the United States.

There's a reason the U.S. government has such rigid rules. As many as 45 percent of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States overstayed nonimmigrant visas, a May 2006 study from the Pew Hispanic Study found. The study estimated that 250,000 to 500,000 of that group had border-crossing cards, or laser visas, available only to Mexicans.

The State Department has issued fewer laser visas each year since 2001, when it granted 1.99 million. By 2007, that total had decreased to 470,329. The consulate in Hermosillo issued the fourth-most in Mexico: 67,807 in 2006, the most recent year that number is available.

The approval percentage dipped to 66 percent in 2007 from 77 percent in 2002. More than 239,000 of the 709,000 applicants were denied in 2007.

Consular officers don't always explain their decisions in detail. That frustrates many applicants, but immigration-control advocates say the process should be even stricter.

"We have an enormous visa-overstay problem," says Steve Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for tougher border control. "Literally, the United States issues millions of time-limited visas and then does not keep track of whether that time limit has actually been honored."

Every day, hundreds of people from Sonora and Sinaloa make their way to the U.S. Consulate in Hermosillo to request border-crossing cards, which permit travel in the border zone stretching north to Tucson for up to 30 days. People can stay longer or travel farther into the country by getting an I-94 form approved by a Customs and Border Protection officer.

Some come on charter buses run by travel agencies that arrange appointments and help get people to the consulate. Others travel overnight on public buses or in their own cars.

Some are college-age students like Edgar Sijatd Ochoa, 24, of Culiacan, Sinaloa, who wanted to accompany his mother on a vacation to the United States. The third-year law student's request for a tourist visa was denied by a consular officer who told him to come back when he was in his fourth or fifth year in college. Still, he vowed to return to plead his case.

"They rejected me, as if they were saying, 'You are going to go and work,'" he says in Spanish. "I want to go visit at Easter with my mom, and that's why I'm fighting to go, not for any other reason."

Many applicants are parents such as Jose David Villarreal, 42, of Hermosillo, who came hoping to reward his daughter with a trip to Disneyland for doing well in school. Villarreal, an electrician who had never visited the United States, entered his appointment skeptical but emerged smiling after he and his 9-year-old daughter, Jhoselyna Alejandra Villarreal Gomez, were approved.

"I can breathe again," says Villarreal in Spanish. "I was nervous. One always gets nervous ... even my daughter was nervous."

But for every parent who leaves a hero, another goes home a goat. Alejandro Bustillos took the day off work and traveled from Alamos, Sonora, only to be denied a visa for his 6-year-old daughter to visit Disneyland with her grandmother.

The rejected head back to their hometowns with nothing but a slip of paper with a general explanation of the denial. They are out the $131 they paid for the interview and any associated travel costs.

The reasons behind the decisions can be elusive, even to those who work outside the consulate and see hundreds of people every week. One person with a good job and money in the bank can be denied while another who fits the same profile is approved. Applicants often say luck plays a big part in the decisions.

But U.S. State Department officials say luck has nothing to do with it. Consular officers are given extensive training on visa requirements and measuring ties to the country, says Cyril Ferenchak, assistant spokesman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, should serve as a haunting reminder why consular officers must adhere to strict guidelines, says Camarota. The plan's leader, Mohamed Atta, was approved for a visitor visa at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, Germany, in 2000.

Applicants like the young couple Castro and Alvarez, however, say they shouldn't be treated like criminals when all they want to do is visit the United States. The couple went to the U.S. Consulate in Hermosillo twice in two weeks in January, both times applying for tourist visas. After they were denied on the first visit, a man calling himself an immigration specialist told them they were qualified and would surely be approved if they tried again.

"We are not going to work there. We just wanted to visit," Alvarez says. "I'm not going to steal anything or do anything bad. I don't even like the United States as a place to live."

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Information from: Arizona Daily Star, http://www.azstarnet.com

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