In the proposal, universities would be required to expand their monitoring
May 10, 2002
The Oregonian
By Eric Lichtblau and Jonathan Peterson
LA Times-Washington Post Service
Washington – The Bush administration, chastened by how easily some of the Sept. 11 hijackers used student visas to wander the United States, has worked out a plan to keep foreign students on a tighter leash and require schools to monitor their activities from the day they arrive, officials said Thursday.
The plan, which Attorney General John Ashcroft is set to announce today, would require U.S. colleges, universities and vocational schools to overhaul their monitoring of foreign students by January or else stop accepting them altogether, administration sources said. That is an earlier deadline than many college administrators had expected.
The foreign market is a significant one for U.S. schools, with about 1 million overseas students now in the country, and many educational institutions have been reluctant to take an expanded role in tracking their students' activities.
But academic groups have grudgingly dropped their opposition to the concept in the fallout over the Sept. 11 hijackings, helping to break a political logjam that has blocked efforts to reform the student visa system since 1996.
"We know that the student monitoring system is happening, whether we like it or not – and some of our members like it more than others," said Victor Johnson, public policy director of NAFSA, an association of international educators based in Washington, D.C.
The student visa overhaul comes just days after the White House announced plans to screen as many as 2,000 visa applications a year from foreign students who wish to study areas of technology considered sensitive.
The plan to be announced by Ashcroft and Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner James W. Ziglar would create a massive Internet-based tracking system to replace an "antiquated, paper-driven system," according to administration sources who asked not to be identified.
It would also expand the body of information that schools would have to collect and give to the federal government through the new automated system, requiring schools to tell the INS if students change addresses, face disciplinary or criminal problems, or drop out of school, among other data, officials said.
Some of this information is already kept by schools on paper, but it is turned over to the INS only rarely and "upon request," the officials said.
Flight training schools, attended by several of the 19 terrorists in the months before the Sept. 11 hijackings, are among those educational institutions that would be affected by the new monitoring rules.
The flaws in the current system became a big embarrassment to the INS in March, six months after the hijackings, when the agency notified a Florida flight school that it had approved student visas for terrorist pilots Mohamed Atta of Egypt and Marwan Al-Shehhi of the United Arab Emirates.
The Internet-based monitoring plan, which the public will have 30 days to comment on before it becomes final, is aimed at ensuring that foreigners in the United States on student visas actually show up at school. Under the current system, said an administration official who asked not to be identified, "they can simply disappear, and we may never know what happened to them."
Schools will have to begin reporting information on new students to the INS by Jan. 30, 2003, with existing students phased in after that, officials said.
Educators said Thursday that while they support the goal of the foreign-student monitoring program, they are concerned they might not be able to meet the January 2003 deadline for implementing it. Many said they are eager to see details of the plan.