U.S. Will Step Up Oversight of Student Visa Program

The Bush administration, chastened by how easily some of the Sept. 11 hijackers used student visas to wander the country, 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 Atty. Gen. 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 major one for U.S. schools, with about 1 million overseas students now in the country, and many educational institutions have been reluctant to take on an expanded role in tracking their students’ activities.

But major 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.

The new rules would take effect after a 30-day public comment period. The bulk of the plan requires no congressional action.

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.

Some civil rights advocates accuse the Bush administration of pushing increasingly xenophobic policies toward foreign students, but law enforcement officials said Thursday that the reforms are a necessary element of eliminating vulnerabilities in U.S. security.

“The interests of the schools were taken into account here, and they are supportive of our approach,” said a senior Justice Department official who asked not to be identified. “Everybody is on the same page here with respect to the desire to maintain the rule of law on student visas, and the schools are going to have to do their part.”

The plan to be announced by Ashcroft and Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner James 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 Sept. 11, are among those educational institutions that would be affected by the new monitoring rules.

The flaws in the current system became a major 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 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.”

While the new system will not be foolproof, “this will greatly enhance the system to make sure that people who enter on student visas are here legally and remain here legally,” the senior Justice Department official said.

“We currently do not have a system of centralizing the information that schools collect, and that’s how Mohamed Atta and Al-Shehhi, utilizing the student visas, were able to exploit the system,” the official said. A third hijacker, Hani Hanjour, was also in the country on a student visa for a Bay Area English-language school but never showed up for classes.

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.

The Justice Department plan effectively ends a debate that has raged for years over how closely U.S. schools should monitor foreign students in this country.

Following the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, members of Congress began calling for a more effective system to track those who enter this country on student visas. Yet even after Congress approved the measure in 1996, progress stalled as universities raised various concerns, including worries about how to administer the fees.

But the political opposition to a modern tracking system collapsed Sept. 11, setting the stage for an array of new controls over foreign students in the United States.

The plan announced by the White House earlier in the week for screening foreign scientists, for instance, is aimed at deterring foreigners from collecting data at U.S. universities that could help them build nuclear and other weapons.

And last month, the INS said it would tighten the rules on student visa applications, barring foreign scholars from enrolling in U.S. schools unless they had already obtained their student visas, a change known as the “Atta rule.” Atta and Al-Shehhi entered the United States as visitors and were then allowed under existing regulations to enroll in the Florida flight school while their student visas were pending--more than a year before their approval.

The varied reforms “add up to a mixed picture,” said Johnson, the NAFSA official.

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 deadline for implementing it. Many said they are eager to see details of the plan.

Administrators at some schools and universities thought they would have until well into next year to finish the job and said they are uncertain how much money it will take for schools to get up and running by January.

“It’s a different problem whether you have 200 foreign students or you have 2,000 foreign students,” Johnson said. “What a lot of schools are nervous about is what is their deadline for compliance going to be and are we going to be able to meet it.”

Terry Hartle, vice president of the American Council on Education in Washington, said that implementing a new monitoring program “is the single best thing the federal government can do to ensure better tracking of foreign students, and we’re eager to work with them in that.”

Hartle, whose group represents the nation’s top 1,800 colleges and universities, said “our concern is that the INS will move at such a pace that they implement a system that isn’t really ready.... This is being done on a crash basis.”

Leo Van Cleve, director of international programs for the California State University system, which has 15,000 foreign students on its 22 campuses, agreed that rushing wide-scale changes into effect could detract from a key mission.

Times staff writers Rebecca Trounson and Stuart Silverstein in Los Angeles contributed to this report.