Student Visas Forever Changed After Sept. 11
WASHINGTON – The tragic events of Sept. 11 have altered many things in this country, especially the way Americans look at and deal with foreigners including foreign students. For 24-year-old Alain Sfeir, a Merrimack College senior, that reality came when the FBI knocked on his door in New Hampshire.
Sfeir said his name popped up on the FBI’s computer because he is Lebanese and flew to California, even though his trip was months before Sept. 11.
“They said that one guy on the plane saw me reading a manual about how to fly an airplane, which is totally ridiculous,” he said. But Sfeir had nothing to hide and was open with the agents. “I knew why they are here,” he said. “They have nothing against me. They’re the good guys.”
“They are very nice,” said Sfeir of the FBI agents. “But it was very clear stereotyping, like profiling.”
Sfeir, who is here on a student visa, believes that after Sept. 11, the visa application process will be much harder for anyone trying to get a United States visa. All 19 of the aircraft hijackers entered the U.S. on legal visas. One of the hijackers, at the controls of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, was in the country on a student visa although he never attended classes.
Only 2 percent of all US visas are issued to foreign students. That means only about 550,000 of the 30 million people receiving visas each year are students. But student visas have come in for heightened attention since Sept. 11 and a number of lawmakers have recently proposed legislation to tighten up the student visa process.
On Nov. 30, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as one of his cosponsors, introduced the “Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act” requiring all visa applicants from a country that sponsors terrorism to undergo a background check.
The legislation also proposes to strengthen the foreign student tracking system implemented in 1996. The reporting requirements for the INS, State Department and universities would be improved to include more information about the student and to monitor whether they attend classes. The INS and State Department will be required to check on schools more often and make sure they are following the requirements for reporting data and record keeping.
How to Get a Visa:
According to an online survey by the Institute of International Education and the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, made public on Nov. 13, 547,867 international students attended American colleges and universities in the 2000-2001 school year.
Chinese students make up the largest group of international students, followed by Indian and Japanese. Asian students make up 51 percent of all international students while only six percent of foreign students are Middle Eastern. California enrolls the most foreign students, 74,281, followed by New York and Texas. Massachusetts, with 29,295 foreign students, has the fourth largest number in the nation attending its academic institutions.
Applying for a student visa can take anywhere from a few days to many months. The visa application process starts only after a student has been accepted at an American school. The school’s international student office then sends the successful applicant an I-20 form, which the student fills out and takes to the U.S. embassy in his or her country, along with a passport and financial documents.
To get a visa, students must prove that they will stay in the U.S. only to study and will return home after their education is complete. Students must also show they have ties to their home country, which is one reason financial documents are so important.
For Amrita Dhindsa, 25, a Boston University graduate student from India who came to the United States in August 2000, the evidence she was going to go back home after college was that much of her father’s business is registered in her name.
“That kind of proves that I am going to go back to my country at some point because I have to look after my business,” she explained. “So it was relatively easy for me to get my visa.”
While Dhindsa got her visa with little trouble, Sfeir, who came here in 1997 from Lebanon, did not.
Because there is no American embassy in Lebanon, Sfeir had to go to Cyprus for his interview. “It’s not a relaxing situation,” he said of his interview experience in the embassy in Cyprus. “You’re standing in a place pretty much like a bunker,” he said. “Steel doors, bulletproof glass. It’s not relaxing.”
Sfeir was denied his visa the first three times. The first two times the embassy did not tell him why it denied his request. The third time the embassy told him some of his paperwork was missing.
“It’s very hard to get through the process,” he said, adding that it is a lot harder for Lebanese to get visas because of the conflict in the Middle East. Keeping
Track of Foreign Students:
There is currently no nation-wide program to monitor international students. However, a program has been in the works since 1997 after the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 became a law. Colleges and universities were given until 2003 to comply with the act, but until Sept. 11, many schools had done little to implement the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). Only a pilot program in 21 schools in the southeastern U.S. had been up and running before Sept. 11.
The pilot program, the Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students (CIPRIS), began in 1997. As of Dec. 17, 10 schools in Massachusetts will be involved in a web-based version of CEVIS, SEVIS, and the entire program is expected to begin to go nationwide in January 2003.
“It takes about a year for INS to get paperwork caught up in the old system,” said Jim Kenaston, international student adviser at Mercer University in Macon, one of the schools involved in CIPRIS, the first pilot student tracking program in the country. “At present it’s difficult for INS to determine if students even showed up at all.”
“We have a database we maintain and give the information to INS,” said Kenaston of Mercer University. Currently, there is a software system each school uses to upload the information to the INS.
The INS has rarely, if ever checked up on school records. According to Dyann DelVecchio, a Boston lawyer who specializes in immigration issues, in the past 15 years the INS contacted a school only if it had a question about a student.
“When SEVIS is really up and running, it’s really going to be a good program; it’s just that it’s had to take a long time to get off the ground,” DelVecchio said. She cited personnel changes at the INS, budget problems and lobbying of the education community as reasons it has taken the tracking system so long to get started.
For years, educators have objected to the collection fee that may be required to keep the system up and running. Many institutions feel that that schools are not equipped to deal with collecting money from students and that this should be a function of the government.
In a January 2000 statement, the American Council on Education urged American colleges and universities to write to Congress objecting to colleges’ collecting the fee. But after Sept. 11, many schools dropped their opposition, agreeing that there is no choice but to implement a monitoring system for foreign students.
“It’s going to happen,” said Joseph Sheehan, assistant dean of admissions and coordinator of international relations at Merrimack College, a school not involved in SEVIS. Despite ACE’s objections, he added, there’s no way the tracking system will not be implemented.
“Once implemented nationally it’ll be a good system,” Kenaston said. “This is all information that schools should be collecting anyway and give the information to the INS in a timely manner.”
Without such compliance, said John Keeley, a research associate at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, SEVIS is “just symbolic” and another loophole in the system.
“I think there has to be a fundamental change in the philosophy and mindset [of the system],” Keeley said. Opposition to the system has been driven, he said, by the unwillingness to single out foreign students and by the burden that fees would put on the schools and the students.
“All of these things have to be put aside when talking about national security, and inconveniencing foreign students doesn’t seem to be a strong argument,” Keeley said.
On the Hill:
The new Kennedy legislation to heighten border security and improve the visa process comes after weeks of discussion and compromise between Kennedy and Feinstein. In September, Feinstein originally proposed a radical six-month moratorium on the issuance of all student visas, which Kennedy and many others strongly opposed.
New Hampshire 1st District Congressman John E. Sununu, R-Bedford, said that he had talked with people in the New Hampshire university system and that there was a “concern” that a moratorium would punish the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding students that come to the United States for an education.
“A moratorium would be a heavy-handed approach,” he said. “What we really need is to modernize and reform the system, and that’s something we need to make a priority and provide funds to implement it.”
Feinstein, after discussing the idea with California universities and the ACE, decided against including a student visa moratorium in her legislation. In her own legislation, Feinstein had also originally considered refusing visas to students from countries that sponsor terrorism unless the Secretary of State issued a waiver to the applicant, but abandoned that approach as well.
When asked why he was against Feinstein’s moratorium plan, Kennedy said there are other ways to protect the nation’s security, such as securing the country’s borders and doing closer screening of visitors.
“Foreign students have a vital role at our universities, and contribute significantly to the spread of our ideals around the world,” he said.
Ursula Oaks, associate director for press relations for the Association of International Educators, said the compromise Kennedy-Feinstein bill is a “more balanced way” of dealing with student visas.
She said the United States should be concerned about everyone who enters the country, not just the “small number” of students from terrorist countries. “I can’t imagine the Secretary of State would look through piles and piles of applicants,” she said, so that effectively, applicants from entire countries would be banned.
“Hooray for the Kennedy-Feinstein bill,” said Alan Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education. “It’s a terrific step forward.”
He said under the bill, the schools and government are each equipped to do their part to make the US safer, but not prevent foreign students from entering the country.
“It brings to life in a very 21st century way all the coordination in reporting that’s needed to have a good visa system,” said Goodman.
But not everyone is pleased with the more liberal approach.
Scott Lauf, executive director of CitizensLobby.com, a non-profit conservative lobbying group, was pleased when he heard about Feinstein’s moratorium idea because he thinks the nation’s tracking system for visa recipients needs a lot of work. During a six-month moratorium, he said, “we will be able to have time to set up a tracking system and consolidate the resources.”
In fact, Lauf prefers more than a simple moratorium. “We should put a hold on the new students who received visas and delay that six months and work with colleges and universities and say we’ll hold the slot for you but delay the admission and entry into the country.”
Lauf said the Kennedy-Feinstein legislation wouldn’t prevent another Sept. 11 and would require only a “flimsy background check” for foreigners to enter the country.
But local Rep. Martin T. Meehan, D-Lowell, believes the new Kennedy bill is the right approach. “The bill introduced by Sen. Kennedy is effective and properly targeted,” said Meehan, D-Lowell. It will “plug holes and prevent abuse” in the student visa program, he maintained. “A moratorium . . . would make sense if there is no effective alternative.”
“The changes in the Kennedy bill are common-sense reforms to the student visa programs,” Meehan said. He added that sharing information among the different agencies and the universities would make the student monitoring system more effective.
Massachusetts 6th District Congressman John F. Tierney, D-Salem said that the Kennedy-Feinstein bill, though it could have a positive effect on the student visa process, is not a “silver bullet” that would solve all problems.
Many universities understand the need for monitoring foreign students but doubt that international students can be prevented from studying in the United States and believe that their presence on university campuses is essential.
“They add culture, they add diversity,” said Martha Flinter, director of International/Study Abroad Programs at Framingham State College. Foreign students introduce American students to cultures and customs they would never have a change of being exposed to without the presence of international students.
“There is plenty of [diversity] of college campuses already,” Lauf argued. “I think national security is more of a concern than diversity.”
“My own problem with the student visa program begins at its essence,” Keeley said. He said foreign students, who usually pay full tuition, support a “fair number” of graduate programs at universities, and he wondered about the extent to which graduate programs have aided countries that support terrorism in their sinister plots.
“How much diversity is really being brought to that program?” Keeley asked, pointing out that only a small percentage of students at American schools are foreign. “It’s naðve to suggest [that a foreign student program] is anything but a cash cow.”
Sheehan admitted that money is certainly one reason foreign students are important to universities, but said that this was only “one side of the coin.” International students also add “personality, color and cultural awareness” to each campus, he said.
“In the good things that we want about our nation, a nation of goodness and tolerance, we need to keep foreign students coming in,” Sheehan said. “They are people and their differences are not so different.”
