 |
International Education MattersA
Forum for Issues Pertaining
to |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
"Be Careful With Those Student Visas" Given that some of the 9/11 attackers made use of student visas to enter the U.S., it was not surprising that the U.S. government afterward put foreign students under scrutiny. There is now a new computerized system called "Sevis" (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) for keeping track of student aliens. But educators are complaining that the federal scattershot approach has the potential over time to erode America's international influence and damage one of the country's most reliable sources of foreign revenues, higher education. They have a point. The growth in enrollments of foreign students has slowed since the attack, partly because bureaucratic caution has festooned the visa application process with red tape. More students as a result are turning to places like Canada and Australia, which are actively recruiting them. Even before 9/11, the U.S. "market" share of an increasingly mobile population of expatriate students had declined, to 30.2% in 1995 from 39.2% in 1982, according to a 2002 report by the U.S.-based Institute for International Education. Given that students represent fewer than 2% of non-immigrant visitors to the U.S. each year, the complaint of inordinate security focus on students is worth pondering. The increased administrative burdens and the threat to college revenues of federally imposed measures are the most immediate concern to American colleges and universities. But a more serious question has to do with the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Through more than half a century, America has been a beacon for talented young people all over the globe. Ministries and corporate executive offices everywhere have become heavily populated with graduates of American schools. Some countries, most especially China, have made it a key policy to send their best and brightest to the U.S. for education. China decided years ago that the best way to acquire American technical and scientific know-how and managerial skills was to send young Chinese to the U.S. It was never quite as magical as assumed, since some declined to return home and those that did often had not acquired cutting-edge technical knowledge. But one result, positive from a U.S. point of view, is that the Chinese government now has thousands of young officials who have been exposed to American-style democracy, civic values and human rights protections. An example of this process was presented to Journal editors last week when we were visited by the new president of the Republic of Georgia and several key members of what he described as his "American" cabinet. Mikhail Saakashvili is himself a graduate of Columbia Law School and worked with a New York law firm before going home to his native land to enter politics. In what he called the "Rose Revolution," the husky 36-year-old lawyer in January trounced Eduard Shevardnadze, a onetime Soviet foreign minister, and swept into power. Among his ministers seated at the Journal's table in New York were Defense Minister Gela Bejuashvili, a Harvard grad, and Internal Affairs Minister George Baramidze, who holds a Georgetown degree. Other cabinet members also have American diplomas. The average age of the Saakashvili cabinet is about 40. It is not a foregone conclusion that an American-educated government would be friendly toward the U.S. But Mr. Saakashvili says (1), "our roots and our identity are with the West" as he sets about to extract his country from the remaining tentacles of the old Soviet system, and for that matter, the Russian empire that preceded it. In Washington last week, Mr. Saakashvili won a pledge from George W. Bush to use U.S. influence to persuade Russia to live up to its longstanding promise to withdraw its troops from Georgia. The Rose Revolution may be contagious. When Mr. Saakashvili went to Ukraine last month to meet with opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, he was greeted warmly, except by the government. "The Ukrainian KGB followed me everywhere I went," he says. He mentions that he was "jumped" in a Moscow hotel by two men who described themselves as "Georgian Kazakhs" who wanted advice on how to start a Rose Revolution in Kazakhstan. And a Belarusan youth group has ambitions to emulate Mr. Saakashvili's movement and overthrow a Communist holdover, the dictatorial Alexander Lukashenko. William J. Perry, U.S. secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, wrote a foreword to the report last year of a task force on student access to the U.S. set up by Nafsa, the Association of International Educators. He said that "educating the world's future leaders is part of the solution to terrorism, not part of the problem." Educational exchanges are what Harvard scholar Joseph Nye has called "soft power," Mr. Perry noted. Mr. Nye's point is a good one. The education of foreign elites is not something the U.S. government has set out to do as a strategic objective like the old U.S.S.R. did when its KGB was going around the world recruiting "agents of influence" by offering them bribes. Rather, American higher education is on the whole a huge private enterprise, not without hang-ups about political correctness and the like, but with intellectual offerings largely free of government influence. It attracts students largely because of its accessibility and quality. To the extent that foreign students experience a greater sense of freedom and opportunity than they did back home, they carry away a good image of America. The Nafsa task force notes that even before the move to give students more scrutiny, U.S. visa laws had strange anomalies. One is the presumption that student applicants are mostly bent on overstaying their visas, and so students are given the impossible task of proving a negative, that they have no such intention. With such rules, consular officers abroad are so burdened with investigating innocent applications that they have little time to look for suspicious motives. The time wasted in investigations of harmless technical violations by students already in the U.S. detracts as well from the need to focus on problematic behavior. The U.S. must, of course, place a high priority on protection against terrorist attacks. Clearly, visa applications must be screened. But another priority clearly should be to rationalize the process so that it is both effective and not damaging to a major source of American influence. URL for this article: (1) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107757418645536969,00.html george.melloan@wsj.com This file was updated on March 12, 2004 |
|