International Education Matters

A Forum for Issues Pertaining to
Intensive English Programs

Editorial
"Keeping foreign scholars at bay "
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, July 4, 2004

SIMING LIU, a 31-year-old post-doctoral astrophysicist at Stanford, regards himself as very lucky -- at least relatively so. After returning to Beijing this May to attend a short course in solar plasma processes there, he had to reapply for a visa to return to continue his research on solar flares at Stanford. That meant being interviewed by a U.S. consular official, who decided after an interview lasting fewer than five minutes that his research had national security implications.

In the jittery post-Sept. 11 environment, his case would typically have been referred to Washington for review, resulting in a possible months-long delay. Perhaps because Stanford University publicized his case, Liu was granted a visa after two weeks, just in time for him to present a paper at the American Astronomical Society in Colorado. "Before Sept. 11, this would never have happened," Liu told us.

Other foreign students and scholars, caught in an excessively intricate bureaucratic and security web created in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, have been far less fortunate. At Berkeley, a doctoral student in archaeology - - a French citizen unluckily born in Iran -- went to France on a temporary visit over a year ago. That's where he still sits, awaiting a visa. A May survey of nearly 1,700 foreign students and scholars at UC Berkeley indicated that 60 percent experienced delays at U.S. consulates or embassies and at U.S. ports of entry. An equal number said they had to alter their travel plans to or from the United States because of visa problems.

Some Bay Area campuses have seen precipitous declines in their foreign student enrollments, especially in English language courses. So far, UC Berkeley and Stanford have been able to keep their large foreign enrollments steady. But at any time officials at both campuses are working to resolve the plight of students and scholars stuck somewhere else instead of being hard at work in the Bay Area.

Stanford's Liu says that the situation has gotten so bad that some of his fellow scholars are afraid to leave the United States to attend conferences abroad or visit their families back home, for fear they will have trouble getting back into the country. He says some Chinese friends at U.S. universities are so anxious that their studies or research will be interrupted that they are thinking they should simply go back to China.

All this adds up to a brewing crisis in American higher education. Foreign students are a critically important asset. Bringing diverse global perspectives from abroad incalculably enriches the academic environment here. Many foreign scholars and students have gone on to make enormous contributions to the economic and cultural life of the nation. Their presence in Silicon Valley is the most obvious example of that in the Bay Area. Those who return to their home countries almost always become fervent ambassadors for the United States. It may be no accident that Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, who was willing to be appointed Iraq's new president, studied engineering at Georgetown University. Imagine for a moment how different Iraq's history might have been if Saddam Hussein had also once spent time on a U.S. campus.

Last month, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the United States must ensure that it remains "a beacon for students. ... If we lose legitimate foreign scholars, if we lose them to procedural frustrations because it is too hard to get a visa, because they don't want to be bothered, we risk losing their goodwill, and that is a priceless thing to lose," he said.

But the obstacles that Powell enumerated are precisely those discouraging foreign scholars and students from coming here. Applications to U.S. universities from foreign graduate students have declined by 32 percent since 2001. Despite the dwindling numbers of applications, the State Department last year rejected 35 percent of student visa applications last year, up from a 27 percent rejection rate in 2001.

It's obvious that even a handful of terrorists posing as students could wreak terrible damage. It's true that some Sept. 11 hijackers acquired skills at U.S. flight schools that enabled them to carry out their attacks. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge points out that 200 people claiming to be students showed up at U.S. ports of entry last fall falsely claiming to be students.

But we imagine Ridge would have disclosed if any of these fake students had terrorist ties. Even taking security concerns into account, there are some simple fixes that can be made. In May the heads of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the presidents of every major higher education association, made several sensible recommendations balancing security concerns with the need to keep our doors open to legitimate foreign scholars and students.

The most urgent change is for Washington to extend security clearances foreign students and scholars receive from the current one-year time period to the duration of their course of study or academic appointment. Visa holders who go home for personal reasons or to attend academic and scientific conferences outside the United States should be allowed to begin renewing their visas before they leave the United States. The State Department must also set up a system to ensure that applicants who have waited for more than 30 days for their visas are given priority in processing. Consular officers must be given more training in how to evaluate research projects in disciplines they have absolutely no expertise in.

There is no time to waste. Other countries, most notably the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, are taking advantage of the bureaucratic morass the United States has set up, and have successfully ramped up their recruiting of foreign students.

The United States will be the loser -- and terrorists the victors -- if it were needlessly to close its doors to worthy foreign scholars and students in the name of national security. Just as the Bush administration says it believes in free trade of goods and services, it must work equally as hard to promote the free trade of study, scholarship and ideas.

This file was updated on July 8, 2004