Visa controlU.S. student visa program fails to monitor participating schools: Lawmaker

A recent ABC News investigation found that DHS officials had lost contact with roughly 6,000 foreign nationals who overstayed the terms of their student visas in the past year and a half, raising concerns that failure to keep track of the students could become a security gap that could be exploited by would-be terrorists. The hijacker who flew an airplane into the Pentagon on 9/11, and the man who drove a van containing explosives into the World Trade Center garage in 1993, were student visa holders who rarely showed up to school.

Today, more than 9,000 schools in the United States participate in the student visa enrollment program. The list includes reputable universities, but it also includes trade schools such as massage and beauty schools. Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has introduced legislation to better monitor schools which attract foreign applicants with the promise of assistance to obtain a student visa. A recent Brookings Institution report showed that the number of student visa holders in U.S. colleges grew from 110,000 in 2001 to 524,000 in 2012.

“Despite this overwhelming increase, the technology and oversight of the student visa program has insufficiently improved,” Grassley said. “Now, 13 years after 9/11, we have sham schools setting up in strip malls without real classrooms. We have foreign nationals entering the U.S. with the intent to study, but then disappear and never attend a real class.”

Grassley wants all schools on the government approved list to obtain accreditation by an appropriate accrediting body. He also points out the failure of DHS to remove a New York City school from the list despite the school’s record of mismanaging its foreign student visa program. Five top officials, including the president at MicroPower Career Institute, a New York state-licensed career college, were indicted on charges of visa fraud in May. Authorities claim that 80 percent of the school’s foreign students had delinquent attendance, a violation of the student visa program, yet the school failed to report them to immigration officials. To date, the school continues to enroll foreign students, to which DHS officials cite the school’s entitlement to administrative due process. “It’s time to close the loopholes and clamp down on schools that have a poor track record with regard to foreign students,” Grassley said.

According to DHS spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has launched initiatives to improve the student visa monitoring program. The agency plans to hire a total of sixty field representatives personally to inspect schools participating in the student visa program. The agency has also launched a program — currently at only one U.S. airport — to alert a customs inspector if a student is attempting to re-enter the country after his or her visa or attendant status has been flagged by a school official. “The Student and Exchange Visitor Program has made significant improvements to the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, increased school and student oversight, and unveiled new policy guidance to close vulnerabilities and better protect our nation from individuals who try to exploit the U.S. visa system,” Cutrell said.

NAFSA, an advocacy group for international students and educators, is concerned that worries on the risk posed by the student visa program have been exaggerated. Only 3 percent of the sixty-one million people who entered the United States on nonimmigrant visas in 2013 held student visas, Rebecca Morgan, a NAFSA spokeswoman said. “It is important to understand that the other 97 percent are entirely unmonitored,” she said. “Students are the only ones that are monitored.”