INS Will Miss Deadline for Foreign Student Tracking

The INS will not meet the congressionally mandated deadline for the new foreign student tracking system, says the Justice Department.

In the Patriot Act passed last December, Congress required that an automated system to maintain information on foreign students be implemented by January 30. The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) will track immigration status changes, changes of address, changes in program of study, and other details.

“The INS has made significant strides, yet we continue to believe that full implementation is unlikely by the deadline,” said Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine.

One of the September 11th hijackers was admitted to the U.S. as a foreign student; he never showed up at the school, and the college did not report that fact to the INS. Two more of the hijackers entered the country as nonimmigrant visitors and then applied to change to student status once they were here.

FAIR was a strong supporter of Congress’ push for a student tracking system. However, we have also pointed out that, while SEVIS holds the potential to be significantly more effective than the INS’s previous, paper-based foreign student monitoring system, it will only be useful if the INS acts on the data being entered into it. Additionally, the INS will need to review and re-certify the thousands of schools currently certified to enroll foreign students and must ensure that information is quickly and accurately entered into the system. Audits of the foreign student program show that many of the over 70,000 institutions registered to enroll foreign students are either fronts for fraud or defunct.

"Once again, INS has been shown to be incapable of bringing the
necessary resources to bear on a mandate from Congress. Fair will keep
fighting to make sure pressure is kept on the INS to fully implement the
foreign student tracking system in a timely manner."

-- FAIR executive director Dan Stein

To date, the INS has not yet issued final rules for what colleges must do to track their foreign students, nor has it announced any concrete plans for verifying the accuracy of the data that schools enter into SEVIS.

A computerized system to track foreign students was designed in 1997 (the Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regarding International Students, or CIPRIS), but due to intense lobbying by colleges, it was never implemented beyond the pilot program stage.

FAIR 10/02