Passport to a Future

It was the fall of 1991 and I had just been accepted into a top-tier business school in the United States. I arrived in New York from my native Egypt, my 5-foot frame almost completely hidden by two huge suitcases containing, among other things, silverware for the dinner parties my mother assured me I would want to give. I had signed up for a studio apartment facilitated by the university. I’m not sure what I envisioned, but it was not the 100-square-foot cell that met me when I unlocked the door. I was downstairs again in a moment, arguing heatedly that these apartments could not have been conceived with human beings in mind.

Thus began one of the best and most fulfilling periods of my life--certainly the most intense. While I didn’t host the kind of dinners my mother had imagined, I did, after nearly two years of sharing misery and triumphs, make lifetime friends at school. The education I received went well beyond the academic. A similar degree may have been had in my home country at the American University in Cairo, but in New York, a whole new world, infinitely more challenging, more demanding in its intensity and competitiveness, had opened up. Where I had previously coasted, I had to work hard and extend beyond myself. Whereas in Cairo I had a whole support system of family and friends to fall back on, in New York I had to build and work on friendships before I could rely on them. I had to reach out across cultural and religious divides. The results were so rewarding.

It was in New York that I discovered that the Coptic Church, of which I am a member, had Judeo-Christian roots; that some of our traditions and rites, such as the way we recognize death, were rooted in Jewish heritage. Like the Jews, we sit shiva for seven days. It was in New York that I trained for and ran the marathon, an endeavor that caused my family and friends back home to wonder whether I had lost my mind.

After graduation, I landed a coveted job that I could not have gotten without my degree. Now based in Egypt, working for a U.S. investment bank, I can cross effortlessly between the two cultures; comfortable with local work norms and able to relax in my own image-rich language, but also imbued with the mental discipline to communicate in bullet points when necessary. It was the best investment I ever made in my future. But it was also, I think, good for America.

Now, Congress has placed restrictions on foreign student visas, and some legislators are calling for their suspension altogether. That would be a pity. I understand the anxiety following the attacks of Sept. 11 and the ensuing desire to lock and bolt the borders. Tighter security measures are definitely in order, but extreme measures such as keeping out foreign students run counter to U.S. interests in the long term.

Education is one of the most effective tools in the fight against terrorism. To deny foreigners opportunities to study and work in the U.S. is to forgo a potent public diplomacy tool and the chance to shape both individual minds and world opinion. In addition to the obvious merits of their education, students take back something less tangible but no less important than book learning: firsthand experience of the country and its people. They are unlikely to fall for oversimplified and one-dimensional characterizations of America’s issues and motives. While a U.S. education won’t buy unwavering support for all U.S. policies--unquestioning loyalty is not, after all, the American way--someone educated there is much less inclined to see in every unpopular action a sweeping representation of what America stands for.

Moreover, students educated in America have much to offer their home countries. In nation after nation, from Eastern Europe to Egypt, these products of an American higher education often become the main drivers of reform in their countries. Shaking off the socialist, inward-looking ideologies they grew up with, theirs can be the loudest voices calling for privatization, economic reform and a general opening up of societies. In most cases, they will also be staunch defenders of the U.S. Even those who criticize aspects of American life do so from personal experience and with great nuance, rather than by blindly parroting hysterical anti-U.S. propaganda. And the benefits of interaction go both ways. Foreign students in the classroom expose American students to different views and cultures, which is essential to prevent a widening of the gap between Americans and the rest of the world.

It seems completely reasonable to more effectively monitor the activities of those entering on student visas, to ensure that they really are enrolled in universities and actually studying. But it’s also important to remember that those who come to the U.S. to study, who willingly spend the time and money it takes, are doing so because they want to improve their prospects, and hope is an antidote to terror.

We are in the end a function of our upbringing and exposure. Young men dispatched to Afghanistan to fight alongside the moujahedeen against the Soviet Union became easy pickings for the noxious, fiery brand of extremism that cradled Osama bin Laden and gave birth to the Taliban. Closed societies, not open campuses, are breeding grounds for terrorism. Lacking a positive political agenda, these stifling, oppressive systems, where questions are discouraged and questioning penalized, deliberately breed and cultivate hatred as a unifying political force. The U.S. should not leave the playing field to them.

I remain Egyptian through and through. Nothing can come close, in my besotted eyes, to this sunny, endearingly laid-back country where I grew up. But in my years in the U.S., I developed a deep affection, admiration and respect for America, for its freedom of thought and expression, for its infinite possibilities and opportunities and, most of all, for its unique ability to absorb different cultures while allowing individualism to flourish. When the Sept. 11 attacks took place, I watched in horror and disbelief from my living room in Cairo. The terrorists had ravaged a city I love--and in the process had also destroyed a piece of me. Because in the end, and unaware of the transformation process, I carry indelibly a piece of America in me.