School's out
Studying in the United States has become a red-tape nightmare for international students.

By George Schulz

FOR THE FIRST time in 25 years, New College of California's English as a Second Language Institute isn't holding any classes for international students. John Krauskopf, a foreign-student advisor at ESLI, says he doesn't know if or when the school will hold classes again.

Across town, San Francisco State University has seen a dip in the number of its foreign students, despite the fact that the school's international student population had been climbing steadily for the past nine years. At the school's ESL extension, where international students often go before transferring to credit programs, enrollment has dropped 40 percent. City College of San Francisco's English-language extension lost nearly a third of its enrollment this summer.

Krauskopf says the problem is a new set of Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) regulations called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System. Described by one immigration official as "an exciting new program" intended to track the activities of international students via computer database, SEVIS has become a bureaucratic and technological snarl for university officials and foreign students.

If that's not enough, California's budget woes have led to increased enrollment fees and higher living expenses and per-unit costs for international students, making a desirable U.S. education accessible only to those with lots of cash and a bit of luck. To the chagrin of administrators and diversity advocates, the same student visa programs that helped educate United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, Mexican president Vicente Fox, and Intel founder Andrew Grove are effectively being sacrificed in the name of national security.

SEVIS versus the world

Following Sept. 11, 2001, Congress denounced the country's student visitor and exchange program as a bureaucratic mess. The INS responded with SEVIS, and passage of the USA PATRIOT Act accelerated the program with a $36 million Congressional appropriation and a January 2003 kickoff date.

SEVIS forces universities to get certified in order to issue I-20 enrollment-approval forms, which are required for students to get visas. Before SEVIS, as Krauskopf and others recently learned, the I-20s issued by schools were literally collecting dust in INS warehouses. And yet now schools need to get certified to issue forms they'd been issuing for years. "I've been here for 10 years, and during that period we were never asked to submit paperwork to the immigration service [for certification] until SEVIS started," said Jay Ward, coordinator of International Student Services at S.F. State.

Worse, the SEVIS system can be incredibly slow to generate I-20s for newly certified institutions, which means a lot of students won't get their visas in time for the fall semester. Part of the problem is that schools have to apply for I-20s through the shoddy SEVIS online database.

"Right now it can take up to a week, only if the system is functioning correctly," said Cessilia Chan, an Institute of International Students administrative assistant at City College. "If it's not working, all I can do is tell the student I don't know when it's going to be ready."

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of the BCIS, manages a SEVIS help desk schools can call for assistance. But the American Council on Education told Congress the help desk's regional office staff are often ill-trained, and Ward said it's not uncommon to wait an hour to speak to a live person.

Additionally, critics say, SEVIS poses a threat to the security of personal information. Virtually every move an international student makes, such as changing majors or dropping a class, is documented in the SEVIS system. And the information is vulnerable. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Kansas City office is still investigating a January SEVIS hacking at the University of Kansas that left 1,450 students the victims of identity theft.

Closer to home, according to the Pasadena Star News, at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, a confidential visa form was misdirected to an S.F. State printer. A Stanford University official who wanted a hard copy of a student's immigration form discovered that it had been sent to a printer at Duke University.

But BICE insists the system works.

BICE spokesperson Chris Bentley said that of the 7,400 schools with one international student or more, 5,000 are now certified to issue I-20s, which to him suggests that SEVIS implementation is going according to plan. He said of the approximately 1.2 million international students in, or planning to be in, the United States, 950,000 are already registered and the rest should be by Oct. 1.

"We're not asking for any new information," Bentley said. "We're just changing where the information is located. We've centralized this information into one database."

Some school administrators share Bentley's optimism. "It's just a matter of time and resources," said Jennifer Piumarta, international student adviser at the University of San Francisco. "Students on the whole shouldn't feel a direct impact. It's the staff."

Unfortunately, students do feel a direct impact long before they begin considering flight arrangements.

Innocence abroad

Once the student has received an I-20 form, she or he must apply for a student visa at a U.S. embassy or consulate. In many countries, that means traveling great distances to wherever the office is located.

Under SEVIS rules, all student visa applicants must be interviewed. But no additional help or resources from the State Department have been provided for this process. That means students may wait months for an interview at which they are asked to prove that they will return to their country after studying in the United States. Often, students from impoverished and war-torn countries, or from regions suffering ethnic, religious, or gender-based discrimination, are denied visas because they are considered to have less of an incentive to return home.

Chan and Ward both said most of the denials they've seen have come from the Middle East, Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

"We all hate this aspect of the law because it's very arbitrary and very subjective," Ward said. "Many people in international education feel that that kind of screening is unfair, but that's what the law says they have to do."

Often the data transfer from SEVIS to the individual consulates or embassies fails, thus requiring the student to wait for the I-20 information to be re-administered via e-mail through the SEVIS help desk. "It's on a very ad hoc basis," Ward said. "Sometimes the information is very readily available; sometimes it isn't."

Ward has a two-inch-thick file on his desk containing documentation of SEVIS-related problems.

If a visa application is denied, the alternative is to reapply later when the circumstances are good enough to please the State Department. But in many cases that means waiting a required six months for reapplication, and by then students must reapply for an I-20 from their school.

Additional hurdles

Many students never have to deal with SEVIS because they can't afford to attend school in the United States anymore. Costs per academic unit for foreign students were stable for 10 years at S.F. State. But this year, tuition for international students jumped 15 percent to $282 a unit. (International students are required to hold at least 12 units to protect their visa status.) At City College, the ESL program costs about $2,300 a semester. At UC Berkeley, the average cost for international students is more than $10,000 a semester, which includes the 30 percent across-the-board fee increases approved by the UC Regents in July. Community college fees average $3,900 a year plus a $330 enrollment fee.

After SEVIS's first year of operation, international students will also pay a $100 fee to keep the system that tracks them up and running, on top of the $100 student visa application fee already in place.

As part of the visa application process, students must prove they have enough U.S. dollars in their bank account to cover school and living expenses. In the Bay Area, that can mean anywhere between $15,000 to $25,000 a year.

Other foreign visitors to the United States will soon be included in the breadth of new immigration policy. In April, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge unveiled the Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, or VISIT, that, according to the Department of Homeland Security Web site, "will capture point of entry and exit information by visitors to the United States." While apparently not as rigorous as SEVIS, the VISIT system will use "biometric identifiers, such as photographs, fingerprints – to create an electronic check-in/check-out system for people who come to the United States to work or to study or visit."

International education organizations also warn that new student visa policies could damage U.S. diplomatic efforts abroad, hinder expanded cultural understanding, and reduce a valuable economic export. The nearly 80,000 international students in California between 2001 and 2002 spent more than $1.6 billion, with more than $400 million generated from nonresident tuition alone, according to the Institute for International Education.

"My concern about this is not that my little school has had to suspend operations," Krauskopf said. "It seems to me the big issue is, 'Does the U.S. want to bring foreign students to the United States to learn about our system and get an education here?' By pushing SEVIS so fast, by pushing changes in consular services, it's really going to impact one of our biggest exports."

George Shultz is an intern at the Bay Guardian.