From the issue dated April 11, 2003
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When We Hinder Foreign Students and Scholars, We Endanger Our National SecurityBy VICTOR JOHNSONThe horrific events of September 11, 2001, changed many things, but they didn't
Nowhere is that clearer than in the field of student and scholarly exchanges. The federal government is beginning, however unintentionally, to dismantle an industry that we spent 50 years establishing in the conviction that the presence of international students and scholars serves the national interest. If things continue as they are, we may wake up in a few years and realize that our country has done lasting damage to this investment in foreign policy. For good reasons, Americans have supported educational exchanges ever since the end of World War II. First, foreign students bring important and growing educational benefits to American colleges. They add diversity to the student body, they provide the first opportunity that many Americans have for close and extensive contacts with foreigners, and they fill perennially underenrolled science courses that colleges would otherwise find difficult to offer. Increasingly, foreign graduate students provide crucial support for teaching and research, particularly in the sciences. Indeed, American graduate education could not function without foreign students. Foreign students also contribute significant economic benefits. According to the Institute of International Education, more than 70 percent of undergraduate foreign students pay full tuition, which is an important way that increasingly privatized public universities make ends meet. Last year, foreign students and their dependents spent $12-billion in our economy. But the most important benefits that the United States has gained from educating successive generations of future foreign leaders are in the realms of foreign policy and national security. Foreign students and scholars, who constitute an exceptional reservoir of good will for our country, are perhaps our most undervalued foreign-policy asset. After the events of September 11, Americans asked, "Why do they hate us?" Unquestionably, there are dangerous fanatics who hate America. But the answer most of the world has given, for those who have chosen to listen, is really quite eloquent: "We don't hate America; sometimes we just hate its policies." The residual affection and respect for the American people, as opposed to official America, are priceless assets for us. Where does that admiration come from? How is it sustained, even through times when people in other countries genuinely do hate our policies? It comes fundamentally from the sheer power of the American idea, which continues to inspire the world. And it is nurtured through exchanges, through programs that bring people into contact with America and Americans, including those that have brought millions of foreign students and scholars to this country. That is why American leaders in foreign policy have continued to affirm the value of international education. As recently as March 14, President Bush said: "I encourage all Americans to join together with our students, teachers, schools, professional associations, and volunteer organizations in reaffirming our commitment to educational exchange worldwide. As we help to strengthen the global community, we build tolerance and improve global prospects for peace." In August 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "I see the benefits of international education every day. ... In my daily activities I encounter world leaders -- from Kofi Annan to Hamid Karzai -- who participated in an exchange program or studied here or abroad. ... People-to-people diplomacy, created through international education and exchanges, is critical to our national interests." September 11 alerted us to new dangers and imposed on us new burdens to scrutinize those who would come to this country for educational or any other purposes. A serious response to this challenge requires carefully considered action because, as a report by a task force convened by NAFSA: Association of International Educators put it, "To unduly restrict the access of future leaders -- and, indeed, the youth of the world -- to this country is to court a greater danger, which is to nurture the isolationism, fundamentalism, and bigoted caricatures that drive anti-Western terrorism. After September 11, it seems clear that the more people who can experience this country firsthand, breaking down the stereotypes they grew up with and opening their minds to a world beyond their borders, the better it is for U.S. security." Given all that, we should have no reason to believe that our nation's leadership intends to hobble the programs and kill off the very enterprise that has made America the leading destination for international students. But, even if inadvertently, our government may be doing precisely that. The time has come for our political leaders to recognize the dissonance between their high-sounding statements extolling the benefits of foreign-student exchange and the ways that government policies are undermining that exchange. We must bridge the gap between rhetoric and practice before it is too late. To do that, the government must deal with three fundamental problems that, taken together, threaten the capacity of our country to continue to attract foreign students and scholars: inefficient visa screening, a problem-plagued foreign-student monitoring system, and overzealous enforcement. State Department officials now feel enormous pressure in considering visa applicants. Their quest for certainty that they will not issue a visa to a dangerous person, and their fear of punishment for what someone may eventually decide was a mistakenly granted visa, have made them much more conservative in their decisions. The result: much greater scrutiny, longer delays, and more denials. Contrary to past practice, visa applications by Arab and Muslim men, and anyone whose purpose in visiting this country relates to science, must be reviewed in Washington. Applicants can now experience delays that stretch into months. For several reasons, such measures tend to affect students and scholars more than other visa applicants. First, their visits are usually tied to programs with specific starting dates. Last year, hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of students, teaching assistants, and visiting professors were unable to enter the country for the fall semester because their visa applications were languishing somewhere in the Washington bureaucracy. In addition, students frequently must get new visas to re-enter the country if they leave temporarily -- for example, to go home during school breaks or to attend international conferences. Arab and Muslim students who have left the United States for the summer or a holiday break have sometimes been unable to re-enter and complete their programs. If the system continues to break down at peak periods, that will inevitably affect people's propensity to apply to study or teach here. The difficulty that Arab and Muslim men experience in acquiring or renewing visas seriously threatens the future of exchanges with that part of the world. Likewise, delays in adjudicating visas for study, teaching, or research in the sciences threaten the viability of scientific exchanges and are having a severe impact on graduate departments. America's scientific leadership rests on its openness to foreign scientific talent. Making it difficult for such talent to come here threatens the very scientific leadership that the controls are ostensibly designed to protect. Already, many colleges have complained about students and scholars -- from entering undergraduate students who declare a chemistry major to world-renowned scientists engaged in decades-long collaborative research at America's elite research facilities -- who have been effectively denied entry to the United States simply because their visas are not adjudicated until their reason for coming is past. Even scientists from countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who apply for visas to do collaborative research for NATO that is supported by American grants, are caught in the visa trap. The same goes for people who seek to study in programs that were established to train foreign scholars in areas that advance specific U.S. foreign-policy objectives, like nuclear nonproliferation. Colleges across the country increasingly worry that they will be unable to get foreign scientists to their conferences or foreign science professors and students into their classrooms. While the breakdown of the visa system is a serious threat, a collapse of the foreign-student monitoring system could shut down the entire exchange enterprise. Under the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (Sevis), not just students but all exchange visitors -- from summer-camp counselors to researchers -- are monitored. Since February, following a two-week grace period in which colleges were allowed to use traditional procedures and forms, all key foreign-student exchange documents must be issued electronically under Sevis. But the system, quite simply, does not work. It is risky to characterize the state of the system on any given day -- even any given hour -- because every technical problem that is solved is replaced by two others, and then the "solved" problem reappears. But as I write, colleges still can't enter the data that the system requires and may be technically unable to issue important admissions documents to large groups of foreign students this spring. Without those documents, students can't apply for visas. The result could be a "lost" entering class of foreign students and an unprecedented blow to our nation's leadership in international education. This happened for reasons that were not only predictable, but predicted. Once Congress reimposed, in 2001, a January 2003 Sevis-implementation deadline that it had repealed a year earlier, it became inevitable that an untested system would be rushed into operation, glitches and all. Sevis should only now be in the testing stage; colleges should still be able to issue paper forms while the system's technical problems are diagnosed and solved. Instead, under political pressure, Sevis is being tested as it is being used. And when it breaks down, the student-exchange enterprise grinds to a halt. Government authorities have exacerbated such practical, systemic problems by their overzealous enforcement. They have detained, for several days, thousands of Arab and other Muslim men who have tried to register under the Justice Department's "special registration" procedures. It is not known how many of them were students, but it appears from the public record that at least some were students who were detained without cause because the investigating official had not interpreted the regulations correctly. One administrator at a district office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent an e-mail message to local colleges listing four reasons for which students in that district had been detained, and calling into question the stewardship of the institutions for letting such violations occur. Yet three of the four violations cited were not necessarily violations at all, depending on the circumstances. No one knows how many students were detained without justification at that particular district office. A student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was in full legal status, was jailed for 48 hours because he was taking less than a full course load. An official in the INS district office in Denver apparently did not know that, under his own agency's regulations, a student is permitted to drop below a full load for a semester, under specified conditions, with the permission of his adviser. Only after weeks of effort did the adviser succeed in getting the student's $5,000 bond refunded and his notice to appear rescinded. In an atmosphere in which, as Coleen Rowley, a whistle-blower at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, recently noted, agents are encouraged to make arrests for public-relations purposes, it is only a matter of time before federal agents detain students who are deemed to be out of status just because it has been technically impossible for their colleges to enter their data into Sevis. Once that starts to happen, the survival of the entire foreign-student exchange industry will be in grave doubt. Meanwhile, the "detain first and ask questions later" approach serves no national-security purpose. In all of the cases cited, the students in question were where they were supposed to be, doing what they were supposed to be doing under the terms of their visas. The alleged (and mistaken) violations were technical and not of national-security significance. Such students are unlikely to leave with warm feelings toward our country -- nor is any prospective student who hears about those cases likely to put America first on a list of desirable places to study. When foreign students are subjected to arbitrary detention in this country, it is noticed abroad. Our country has yet to face up to the likely cumulative effect of the actions that I've cited. Data on foreign-student enrollments at American colleges lag a year behind the reality. Thus, we will not know the impact on next year's enrollments until the year after next, and we will not be able to discern trends until some years later. By that time, the damage will be irreparable. But the anecdotal evidence is alarming. Ambassador Kenton W. Keith, chairman of the Alliance for International Educational and Cultural Exchange, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February that his alma mater, the University of Kansas, told him "that undergraduate applications for the fall are down 20 percent, and that it finds good students around the world increasingly looking to Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand for higher education. Growing difficulty in attracting foreign faculty and researchers leads my colleagues in the heartland to the conclusion that many in the international scholarly community, both faculty and students, view the U.S. as inhospitable to them." His comments could apply to any number of colleges around the country. How do we close the breach between policy and practice? We at NAFSA recommend the following:
Victor Johnson is associate executive director for public policy at NAFSA: Association of International Educators and a former director of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 31, Page B7
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
