Advocate Summary

Issue:  Student Visas & Laboratory Security
Advocate:  The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) – Paul Egan and John Marin
Date of Interview: 7/8/02 

Basic Background
Our involvement goes back before September 11th to the 1996 legislation that first established the student tracking system in legislation which was the IRA system. And I believe we testified an that aspect of the legislation, I’m not sure but in any case we’re on record as supporting the establishment of that student tracking system at that time. Several parts of that legislation were prompted by the terrorist attacks in 1993 and in the interim period California did proposition 181. But from our perspective, we’re a group that believes we really ought to get control over who comes into the country, not that we ought to restrict all immigration but that those who come here should go through some process where they are deemed desirable to be here. And that takes in the topics not only of legal immigration and illegal immigration but also like the visa waiver program which is a program that allows several countries to enter the US without a visa and certainly the non-immigrant student visas. And the question arises in the wake of 93 and certainly in the wake of September 11th – what are the controls in place that will permit the INS to monitor these folks that are here, and to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to be doing. As it has stood for a long time, the INS has virtually no idea how many non-immigrants are here, of those that are students which ones are going to school, are still in school, they don’t even know who’s left the country. And that from a security standpoint is not a particularly heartening piece of news. So SEVIS was set up as a demonstration project essentially in ’96 rather than a national mandatory system. 

And to back up a second, something that is important in the chronology is to note that if the ’96 legislation had moved ahead as scheduled then that system should have been in effect before September 11th and what happened on that was that the higher education establishment in the United States conducted an aggressive lobbying campaign of Congress to forestall the implementation of the student tracking system. To do that basically they used a somewhat of a red herring issue which was that they never have been in a position of trying to collect fees from students and turn those over to the federal government which would have been required under that legislation. There was a user’s fee that was established in the legislation, 95 dollars per student and the university was required to collect that fee and turn it over to the immigration service. So they argued that they should not have to collect that fee, that instead it should be set up in some fashion whereby the US government collected the fee and that was successful in differing, in effect sidetracking for a period of time the implementation of the student tracking program. So basically then when we had the September 11th attacks then all of the sudden it put the issue back on the front burner with a need to speed up that implementation, a perceived need to speed up that implementation. It never was fully killed but it was simply taken off of its normal schedule of implantation by the activities of the education establishment. 

There was a provision in a bill that was just introduced two weeks ago by George Gekas (R-PA) who chairs the immigration subcommittee and it would require as part of this tracking system that universities would track what specific courses students were taking – that it might be possible to understand who is taking advanced nuclear physics.   

Prior Activity on the Issue 
Our involvement goes back before September 11th to the 1996 legislation that first established the student tracking system in legislation which was the IRA system. And I believe we testified an that aspect of the legislation, I’m not sure but in any case we’re on record as supporting the establishment of that student tracking system at that time.

As much as anything there was a political climate that was receptive to this sort of thing, much more so than in subsequent years. And for want of a better word, the emasculation of the student tracking system that followed the ’96 legislation was kind of the reflection of the ebb of that kind of climate farther and farther you got away from the ’93 event the less energy is invested in staying to course. And we are seeing that to some extent now I think. I think that it would be fair to say that the student tracking system issue was fairly low down on our list of priorities. Our work is much more focused on immigration as opposed to non-immigration like visa issues, and it is much more focused on illegal immigration issues than legal immigration. And this being a non-immigrant issue and a legal process for the most part, relegated it to not be very high on our priority list but it was something we continued to watch and to speak out on. But post-9/11 it has certainly taken on a much higher profile. And the environment has absolutely shifted again, and that is ebbing to some extent. We fought all last year and some of this year against a proposal to grant legal status to individuals who were in violation of their visas for whatever reasons I think we’ve gained some strength because we’ve been able to cast that, and I think properly as an award of amnesty. Let me put on one other contextual comment – that is that the strongest proposal dealing with the foreign student issue in the wake of September 11th was one that came from Senator Feinstein and that was to adopt a moratorium on the issuance of all student visas until the immigration got a system of tracking those students and got some control. And we did not propose that, that was not our idea. She came out more strongly than we did on that one, though we were supportive and in agreement of that proposal. She actually backed off that initial proposal presumably in response to a lot of pressure from higher education institutions. She met with the higher education people and pointed out to them how uncooperative they had been with the ’96 tracking system. So they certainly had to find a way to do something, but she ultimately backed off the moratorium proposal and they pressed very hard successfully.  

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
We initially put together an overall plan to address security concerns with immigration and actively supported the provisions in the Patriot Act. The plan was sent to all members of congress. We spent a lot of time briefing staff people on the Hill on what was in it and certainly student visas was one part of it. And I think we were able to convince most people to include it in the Patriot Act which I think was originally intended was a proposal by the Justice Department which was relatively limited in scope, some would say it was broad in scope but it was limited to enhancing surveillance rather than taking up the issues of student tracking or anything else that had to do with immigration. And as it passed, albeit it contained the tracking system, it didn’t contain very much other than that, which is why the Enhanced Boarder Security and Visa Entry Act that was enacted just about a month ago was so important – it was largely the brainchild of Senators Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kyl. I think the enhancements to the provisions in the Patriot Act that were in subsequent legislation are very important they tightened it up considerably. 

We were constantly commenting on these issues in the media, speaking personally I probably gave a dozen newspaper interviews on this particular subject and half a dozen to a dozen radio interviews, I can’t remember if I did any TV on this particular issue and our executive director is the one that most often is the spokesperson for the organization, I’m sure you could say that he appeared on nationally televised programs a number of times. Also we’ve had editorial published on the topic. We relied pretty heavily to advance our agenda through the media not to the exclusion of trying to do some things with congress. But frankly our best allies on many of these issues are in the House rather than the Senate and I kind of have a theory about why that is. You would think just reflexively that Republicans would be more receptive than Democrats and as a general statement there’s some truth to that but there is a growing division within Republican circles and it is particularly pronounced in the Senate, less so in the House. And it’s a division between classic conservative Republicans who view the role of the state as including protection of basic elements of sovereign government, controlling borders, having a say who comes in who doesn’t that would include students or anyone else for that matter, but on the other side you have those Republicans that I would characterize as economic libertarians and they are strong supporters of free trade and all of the things that go with free trade; free movement of goods, services and labor. And so when it comes to issues of immigration generally, this one also, there is a reluctance to place restrictions because it might somehow interfere with commerce and trade, the free flow of ideas across borders, taking students attending schools wherever they wish to attend. And for what reasons I don’t know but it seems to be. And I think that is the reason for the ’96 legislation getting derailed was the influence of Senator Spenser Abraham with that libertarian point of view. 

As a preeminent national membership organization working on immigration reform, that gives us a little bit different perspective then some of the other organizations that we would have worked with on this. But as I remember it, our grassroots activity was our members were basically in support in general of the legislation that Feinstein/Kyl were pushing rather than specific to the particular issue of student tracking, that was part of how we described the importance of that legislation in urging our members to write and call their members of congress but it was not targeted specifically on that measure. It would be a mistake to leave you with an impression, that even though student tracking is one of the issues we’re looking at, it would be a mistake to take away from this conversation that that has been the main thrust of what we’ve been trying to accomplish. We focused principally on security. We focused on the entry/exit system database that would keep track of all foreigners coming and leaving the country. We made a big stink at the end that exempts Canadian nationals from that system. We thought that in database system between the many agencies combating terrorism was a critical piece of this legislation and so that the FBI, and the State Department, and the consular service and the CIA should shared information that was relevant to the respective agencies so that you don’t have one agency, and you see that today with all the scandal between the FBI and the CIA and the turf wars over the Homeland Security Agency. 

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
We haven’t been that active on the Homeland Security legislation debate, but we will continue to be mindful of what becomes of the INS as part of it, what will the INS look like – will it look like Sensenbrenner’s bill, will it look like Kennedy’s bill describes. I guess more importantly for someone that deals with Capitol Hill all the time, what will it mean for the agency in terms of which committees are overseeing it, right now it is the House and Senate Judiciary committees and to a lesser extent the Government Reform committee because they have some jurisdiction over all agencies. If for example because of all the pieces of all these different agencies come together in a single Homeland Security department, the 64,000 dollar question remains will Congress have the courage to establish separate standing committees in the House and Senate to oversee that department or will jurisdictions be spread across the committees and subcommittees of the House and Senate. A very real argument could be made that moving INS jurisdiction to a different venue other than the Judiciary committee could be very helpful – the House Judiciary committee is probably the most politically polarized committee in the congress, and is so for a very good reason, it is to kill legislation. There is an undercurrent of talk of creating a new committee, if you look below the surface of what is being reported on, you’ll see that the committees are scrambling – just look at the list of hearings that have been scheduled, every committee that has any sort of piece of action over this, over the bodies that are going into this, are scheduling hearings, which are overlapping and duplicative, but they all want to insist that they still maintain turf. Congress can’t reasonable oversee a department of that size if its jurisdiction is scattered far and wide. 

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
In 1996 when Lamar Smith (R-TX) came to the House he was then the chairman of the Immigration subcommittee of the Judiciary committee and he was a champion. We worked principally with Senator Feinstein because she was the one on the moratorium. There was other legislation tentative that would have done much, much less that was introduced by Kennedy and Brownback, they are the chair and ranking committee on the immigration subcommittee in the Senate. Feinstein is a member of that committee but she also chairs another committee and her ranking member on another committee is Kyl who also serves on immigration. So they worked something out with Kennedy and Brownback and it ultimately came to fruition as what ultimately passed. The House acted before the Senate did but that was a result of some work done by Chairman Sensenbrenner in the House, Senator Kyl managed to bring him along so the initially passed this thing in December of last year. 

We also worked very closely with the House Immigration Reform Caucus, and that’s a caucus that grew from about 16 members prior to September 11th to 62 members and I thing that is as good of a barometer of the change of political climate as there is. Congressman Tom Tancredo is the leader of that and we’ve been working with his staff and we’ve been working with the staff of the Immigration subcommittee. 

Targets of Direct Lobbying
None mentioned.

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
[No specific targets mentioned but grassroots were employed.]

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
We worked with another group called Members USA, we worked to a lesser extent with the Center for Immigration Studies, we’ve been working with a coalition called the USA Coalition, which consists of some of the same groups not all and we try to decide both media strategy as well as legislative strategy and what issues we want to promote. 

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
Let me say it’s not that we haven’t sought to build some bridges particularly with INS, they have not been receptive to our overtures. Part of that is probably the politics of the administration’s desire to court the Hispanic vote, I mean we’re talking about limitations and they’re talking about amnesty. And in the previous administration, the immigration commissioner we had specifically called for her resignation, so…she was not particularly well inclined toward us. 

[Opposition]
It’s a pretty large group of organizations, the crux of it is sort of an unholy alliance between business interests, in this case I think I would lump the universities in with that, they see their own financial interests, certainly the hospitality industry and the other part of this alliance is the ethnic advocacy groups, immigrant rights, and you also have the civil liberties groups. That’s another good bi-polar example of the civil liberties organizations on the one hand and the libertarians on the other, so it’s sort of the left and the right working together on this issue. I would say it tends to be the extreme right and the extreme left and we think that we represent more of the main stream of public opinion, as shown by public opinion polls.  

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
Well that you can’t track students unless you know where they are, you can’t track students unless you know that they are here, you can’t track students if you don’t even know that they’ve left. When the FBI and the Justice Department launched this review of Middle Eastern nationals that were here, it became immediately clear that the INS had no clue as to how to find these people. And they still haven’t been able to find a significant subset of those people that they were looking for, not to arrest or detain but just to interview. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
We’re on record as supporting the reorganization legislation that has been introduced in the House, that would in effect abolish the INS as it is currently constituted and establish a new divided operation that separated services on the one had and enforcement on the other hand. It is passed by the House and a Senate version is pending. They will likely fall under the House and Senate Homeland Security bills. 

We also argued that they should be prepared to make this change in INS as part of an overall broader reorganization of border control so it was in effect on record before the Bush proposal for the Homeland Security department. 

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
We are always pretty unitary with our message, it’s pretty straight forward. I mean you can make some arguments that resonate with some members better than others not to the exclusion of, for example if you are talking to a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and you can point to issues of displacement resulting from immigration, you can talk about wage reduction as a result of immigration, particularly undocumented immigrants are much more easily subject to intimidation and that has a wage depressing effect and that rings clear with some members more that others. Another example would be in our messages that we send to membership, that we would suggest one similar letter to all members of congress unless they are already a sponsor of the legislation and a different message if they were a sponsor, it’s not really tailoring our arguments to if the person was a Republican or a Democrat or a Blue Dog, but rather urging a member to become a cosponsor of legislation but if they already were a co-sponsor to simply express their appreciation for their representative’s support.  

Nature of the Opposition
It’s a pretty large group of organizations, the crux of it is sort of an unholy alliance between business interests, in this case I think I would lump the universities in with that, they see their own financial interests, certainly the hospitality industry and the other part of this alliance is the ethnic advocacy groups, immigrant rights, and you also have the civil liberties groups. That’s another good bi-polar example of the civil liberties organizations on the one hand and the libertarians on the other, so it’s sort of the left and the right working together on this issue. I would say it tends to be the extreme right and the extreme left and we think that we represent more of the main stream of public opinion, as shown by public opinion polls.  

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
On the student tracking issues, as I mentioned, the arguments that were put up by the universities was kind of a red herring issue of the collection of the fee. But after legislation was passed that changed that responsibility they continued to opposed progress in setting up the tracking system arguing that they didn’t want to create a Big Brother atmosphere on the university campuses, they didn’t want to discourage foreign students from coming to the United States, they would perhaps be more likely to go to Canada or Australia. And there were foreign student associations saying that you shouldn’t be singling out foreign students for tracking. I’d say the main organization on this one was the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers, NAFSA, that is part of the university establishment, very much a step child of the establishment. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
[Not secondary but changed over time, see above.]

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
None mentioned.

Described as a Partisan Issue
No.

Venue(s) of Activity
Immigration subcommittees of the House and Senate Judiciary committees
 
Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
[The USA Patriots Act and the Border Security act passed and were signed into law, the Homeland Security Legislation is still being debated – shooting for a symbolic date of September 11th 2002.]

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
[Opposed to the status quo, working for stricter control of immigration generally and student visas and a student tracking system specifically.]

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
John: I’ve been here about six and a half years and before that I was at the Center for Immigration Studies, and I’m a retired foreign service officer, so I have consular experience from when I worked for the federal government. And I acted as a refugee coordinator when I was in the Sudan so I have some refugee experience as well. And I did some evaluation of foreign student programs in the United States for a couple of years, working under contract with the Agency for International Development. 

Paul: I’ve been here about a year and a half, I’ve been a lobbyist for 23 years my first exposure to immigration issues as a set of issues came when I was working for the American Legion and the run up to the immigration reform legislation in ’96, so I worked on amnesty issues and worker verification issues. So I had an interest in it, and it’s an issue that if you spend any time at all with it it captures you. Then I moved on to a whole different set of issues and then came back to it here. 

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We’re almost entirely in-house, for the most part we are essentially working with official data that is made available by the immigration service, the census bureau and to some extent also by the universities on this issue. We haven’t commissioned studies for the most part, thought we are involved in some of that at the present time but not on this particular issue. 

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
One - four.

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
I’m the principle lobbyist but I have a staff of four and we are all prepared to go on the Hill, and we have in-house legal counsel which is very helpful in drafting amendments and full scale bills from time to time.  

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Individuals 

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous

[They noted to go to their website they have some material on there concerning this issue]