We've been doing a number of important things.
I want to share some good news with this committee. We have seen significant reductions in the number of people who have been presenting themselves irregularly at our border and subsequently making a claim for asylum. So far, year-to-date, there has been about a 47% reduction in the number of people who have crossed our borders irregularly. That's a direct result of some very effective interventions that our agencies and officials have been undertaking—outreach into populations in the United States and elsewhere around the world to provide them with better information about our system. Unfortunately, there's a great deal of misinformation and people who would exploit those who are in a vulnerable position, which has I think contributed to that influx of people at our border.
We've also been working very closely with U.S. and other international officials with respect to the issuance of visas. We saw, for example, a significant number of people from one particular country in Africa who were issued tourist visas to come to the United States who subsequently presented themselves at the Canadian border seeking asylum. As a direct result of interventions made with U.S. border patrol officials and their visa issuance systems, as well as through investments made by CBSA, which put officials overseas to work collaboratively with the U.S. officials in the issuance of those visas, we've achieved a 73% reduction in the number of individuals coming from that country through the United States who subsequently present.
One of the things we found, and I hope this gets to the answer of your question, is that we also needed to significantly increase the capacity of the IRB to conduct timely hearings. Their ability to conduct those hearings was resulting in their falling further and further behind due to the volume of people who were presenting—and not just irregularly. We've also seen a significant increase in the number of people who are crossing regularly at airports, regular points of entry, and making inland claims. So we needed to invest in IRB's capacity to do timely hearings.
We made an investment last year of some $73 million to begin to build up their capacity. It significantly improved their ability to deal with that backlog, but we recognized that more needed to be done. That's why in budget 2019 we're adding over $207 million to the IRB, with the intent that by 2020 they'll be able to process 50,000 claimant hearings each year. As a result of better administration of those hearings, more timely results are being determined, and the amount of time it takes to resolve these eligibility claims is being significantly reduced. In achieving that reduction, I think we were able to create a system that is much more balanced and in which people have a reasonable expectation that if they are in need of protection, they'll receive it in a timely way, and if they are not in need of protection they'll be removed from Canada in a timely way.