INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION AS A NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE

Keynote Address
Global Associates Knowledge Network
University Continuing Education Association

Post-conference Symposium
Toronto, Ontario
April 20, 2002

Victor C. Johnson
Associate Executive Director for Public Policy
NAFSA:  Association of International Educators

Thank you for allowing me to be with you this morning.  

I'm particularly grateful for the opportunity to share this day with colleagues from our host country, Canada, and also from Mexico--two countries with which I had a close association during my 12 years as staff director of the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the U.S. House of Representatives.  I hope you'll forgive me for focusing on U.S. national security, but that's my assignment.

A keynote address is, among other things, supposed to arouse enthusiasm.  And that's why they aren't usually scheduled for 9 on a Saturday morning at the end of a week-long conference.  I hope everyone has plenty of coffee, because I think we'll need a high caffeine level to pull this off.

But I am reasonably confident that I'm going to be provocative, probably make a few people mad--which my colleagues inWashington will tell you is my specialty--and hopefully help set a policy context for your discussions throughout the rest of the day.

NAFSA has argued that the United States needs an international education policy that articulates the role of international education in advancing U.S. interests in the global age.  A couple of years ago, NAFSA and the Alliance for International Educational and Cultural Exchange, with input from an inter-association task force, co-authored a statement entitled, "Toward an International Education Policy for the United States."  I've provided you with a copy of that statement, along with a brochure about NAFSA.

This morning I want to update that statement, and talk about international education as a national security issue post-September 11.

To begin with, I want to take you back three years--way before September 11, 2001, but to a time much like the one we live in now, albeit on a lesser scale.  It was a time of great insecurity in the United States regarding our vulnerability to foreign threats, a time of ethnic stereotyping and racial profiling, a time of great huffing and puffing in the United States Congress about the need to control the access of foreigners to our educational and research institutions, and indeed a time when an immigrant sat in prison, in solitary confinement, while the authorities tried to figure out what to charge him with.

That person was Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese-American scientist who worked at Los Alamos national laboratory and who was picked up because they had to arrest someone.  You all remember how he was finally released with apologies from the judge.  But remember also the headlines:  "They"--in this case, the Chinese--were stealing our secrets; "they" had to be kept out.  Remember the congressional committee investigations, the press releases, the front-page banner headlines.

Of course, nothing approaching the September 11 tragedy, but nonetheless a time when those of us who uphold the value of exchange were under daily siege and attack.

I was reminded of this when I picked up the March 26 New York Times, and saw the headline right there on the front page:  "Weapons Labs Offer Changes to End Boycott."

Because of their anger over the treatment of Wen Ho Lee, Asian-American academic organizations had started a boycott of the national labs, urging Asian-American scientists not to apply for jobs there.  They agreed to end the boycott when the labs entered into an agreement to increase opportunities for Asian-American scientists. 

The administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the labs, was quoted as saying:  "There's a strong business case that I can't afford to cut ourselves off from the best and brightest minds in the country, and there's a strong moral case that we're going to do the right thing." 

I cite this case to make two points.

First, we feel threatened now, but this too shall pass.  Three years ago we had rampant ethnic profiling in the labs, and today we have official recognition of the importance of foreign-born scientists to our national security.  Three years ago we didn't know if we could save U.S.-China scientific exchange; today those exchanges are alive and well, as far as I know.

Second, we do have the power to influence events.  Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education--the group that led the two-year boycott of the labs--is, I suspect, just like us.

Some years from now, we will be able to look back to today and realize that we not only survived, but emerged strengthened--if we learn how to act effectively in the political arena.  I want to circle back to that thought at the end of my remarks.

Since September 11, international education has re-emerged as a national security issue.  On the one hand, we've been challenged on the question of whether or not we can afford to remain open to international students and scholars, given the possibility that they might threaten our safety and security.  On the other hand, there is renewed interest--whether or not backed up with real money remains to be seen--in foreign area studies, foreign language learning, exchanges, and study abroad as measures that could increase our capabilities to prevent and combat terrorism.

Our profession tends to get nervous when we find ourselves in the national security arena.  The core of this profession consists of people--god bless 'em--who believe in the inherent goodness of the cross-cultural and exchange experience.  They're working for international understanding and world peace--the same reasons I joined the Peace Corps 40 years ago--and I think that's wonderful.  May it always be so.

But I've got news for you.  In this day and age, international education is a national security issue, and we'd better get used to it and prepare ourselves to be successful in that arena.

Maybe it's because I've spent most of my career in the foreign policy field, but for myself, I welcome the national security debate.  Because ladies and gentlemen, the debate over international education as a national security issue is a debate we win hands down.

As the terrible events of September 11 made clear, one person who can enter the United States--or Canada, or Mexico--with the intent to commit a terrorist act is one too many.  The U.S. higher education community is fully committed to strengthening protections against terrorism.  For ourselves, NAFSA has been heavily involved in legislation in Congress.  We helped write--and we support--the border security legislation that is now pending with strong, bipartisan cosponsorship.

Congress has called for the speedy implementation of the international student tracking system called SEVIS and--notwithstanding all the problems we have with that idea--in a post-September 11 spirit of unity, we have placed our full support behind that goal.  NAFSA maintains the state-of-the-art web site on SEVIS implementation.  Our SEVIS implementation task force meets regularly with the INS, and coordinates the activities of dozens of NAFSA volunteers who have undertaken to help their colleagues in the profession understand how to implement SEVIS.  At our invitation, the INS is going to be all over our annual conference in San Antonio in May with virtually round-the-clock SEVIS demonstrations.

No one can accuse us of ignoring post-September 11 national security imperatives and make the charge stick.  Having said that, where will all this leave us?

I trust you all know the numbers.  International students and scholars constitute a tiny proportion--less than 2 percent--of the 30 million foreign visitors who enter the United States every year with visas, and a minuscule proportion of the hundreds of millions who cross our borders legally each year.  Precisely one of the September 11 hijackers entered the United States on a student visa.  He never enrolled in school.  Two more came in on tourist and business visas and later applied for adjustment to student status to attend flight school.  Had the student tracking system been in place at the time, it would have caught none of these people.

We are going to implement a very expensive tracking system--expensive for international students, expensive for schools, and because those resources have to come from somewhere, expensive for American students who will be deprived of the educational benefits that those resources could have provided--and at the end of it all we will know everything there is to know about two percent of the population of concern and nothing about the other 98 percent.  We already know more, today, about international students, than we will know at the end of the day about the other 98 percent.

I submit to you that no one who understands national security could think that the focus on international student tracking is well placed.  The terrorist threat is very serious; our nation's response must be equally so.  Daunting foreign policy, military, intelligence, and security challenges confront us.  Given that international students are already among the most closely monitored of all nonimmigrant visitors, it is difficult not to see increased monitoring as a diversion from the task at hand.

Let's think clearly about national security.  If we do, we will immediately understand that international education is not a negative for national security; it is integral to national security.  It is not part of the problem of terrorism; it is part of the solution to terrorism. 

A great deal changed on September 11--but not everything changed.  The United States still needs friends in the world--now more than ever.  One of the most important but least appreciated successes of American foreign policy has been the reservoir goodwill toward our country that we have created by educating successive generations of world leaders.  I invite the Ambassador, who will follow me at the podium, to contradict me if he disagrees, but I don't think I've ever met an ambassador who did not say that exchange programs were among the most important things in his or her arsenal for serving the interests of the United States.

It is through international education that the United States will continue to renew its capacity for global leadership by educating future world leaders.  Secretary of State Colin Powell reaffirms this truth repeatedly in his statements.  This is what Joe Nye, a former assistant secretary of defense who heads Harvard's Center for International Affairs, in his book, The Paradox of American Power, calls "soft power"--the ability to influence others because they share your values.  The United States has more soft power than any other country in the world.  It derives, in part, from being the destination of choice for international students.  And that's exactly why international education is a national security issue.

September 11 did not change the fact that American pre-eminence in science is not an accident.  It is due fundamentally to our openness to scientific exchange, which has enabled the United States over the generations to benefit from the best scientific expertise in the world.  The "Chinese scare" of three years ago was only the most recent time when people have been tempted to try to close off the scientific enterprise in the United States to some group of foreigners.  Every time we try to do that, we rediscover the fundamental truth that our national security depends on the freedom of foreign scholars to participate in scientific exchanges at American universities and research institutes.

Now we face another threat to scientific exchange in the form of Presidential Decision Directive 2, signed by President Bush last October 29, which directs the United States government to "prohibit certain international students from receiving education and training in sensitive areas, including areas of study with direct application to the development and use of weapons of mass destruction."  

This injunction poses a potentially severe threat to graduate education in the United States, if it ends up significantly limiting access of foreign graduate students, teaching and research assistants, and instructors in the scientific fields to U.S. graduate schools.  Fortunately, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is coordinating the response to PDD-2, recognizes this.  As an OSTP official said the other day at a NAFSA conference, we recognize that scientific exchange presents an opportunity for terrorists, but scientific exchange is also how we out-learn terrorists.  There's more wisdom in that sentence than you often find coming from a federal government office.

It's through scientific exchange that the United States will maintain the scientific edge on which our national security rests.  And that's why international education is a national security issue.

There's something else September 11 did not change:  It did not change the fact that the United States cannot lead a world it does not understand.  For the most part, Americans--leadership and ordinary citizens alike--have no idea how our policies and actions are perceived in the rest of the world.  We think everyone thinks as we do.   This cannot continue if we wish to be safe in today's world.

NAFSA has said that in this day and age--and especially since September 11--no American should graduate from college without a basic knowledge of at least one world area and at least one foreign language.  The best way to accomplish this is by making study abroad a routine component of undergraduate education.  The United States can no longer afford to be passive about promoting study abroad.  It's a national security imperative.  

And we have to halt the atrophy of the educational and exchange infrastructure through which we produce and renew high-level foreign language and foreign area expertise.  After September 11, we discovered yet again that federal agencies--especially law enforcement and intelligence agencies--lack the expertise in critical languages and areas to be able to understand the world where terrorism arises and to read the languages in which terrorists communicate.

Is international education a national security issue?  You bet it is.  It's through international education that we will prepare the next generation to lead the world and will prepare our citizens function effectively in a global environment.

And it's through international educational and cultural exchanges that we will promote international understanding and introduce foreign citizens, scholars, and professionals to the United States and to the world beyond the borders of their countries.  Is it not in our interest--is it not in the world's interest--for there to be more rather than fewer people in the countries from which terrorism springs who have experienced something of the world, who have read something other than their sacred texts, and who have heard points of view other than their own?  The question answers itself.  Yet U.S. funding for exchange programs has declined by 40 percent in real dollar terms over the past decade.

Where were those who speak so loudly about national security when that serious damage to our national security was being done?  International education is indeed a national security issue, and we forget it at our peril.

Let me talk for a moment about the intensive English industry.  The United States is about to impose a nontariff barrier on one of its own industries--now that's thinking out of the box--in the form of a $95 fee that international students will have to pay for the privilege of being tracked while they're in the United States.  This affects all students and scholars, of course, but it impacts most heavily on the short-term programs, such as intensive English programs.  The shorter the program, the less likely that the student will be willing to pay a $95 add-on that's charged by no other English-speaking country.

On top of that, the INS is now talking about making it harder for people to change from tourist or business status to student status while in the United States.  This is because of the now-famous posthumous change of status recently granted to two of the terrorists so they could attend the flight school that they had already left.  I'm out of my area of expertise here--Peter Thomas could speak to this--but I believe such changes of status are a fairly significant part of the market for the intensive English programs.

The United States may be the first great power to set out deliberately to kill off the industry that teaches its language to speakers of other languages.  Traditionally, great powers view spreading their language as a way to spread their influence.  Making it harder for people to study English in the United States is indeed a bizarre way to promote our national security.

So it's an open-and-shut case.  International education is more--much more--of a national security issue post-September 11 than it was half a century ago when visionary post-World War II leaders understood that the challenges of the cold war required Americans to be knowledgeable about the world and set up the pathbreaking exchange programs of that era.

The question then becomes:  How do we get that truth adopted as a matter of United States policy?

At the beginning of my remarks, I took you back to the Wen Ho Lee case and the effective actions of the Asian-American groups, and I suggested that we would emerge successfully from our current trials if we, too--the international education community--could learn to act effectively in the policy arena.  

I want to close by coming back to that thought.  If you remember nothing else that I've said this morning, remember this:  The globalization of terror has propelled those of us who promote the globalization of education ineluctably into the policy arena.  

We don't really have a choice about whether or not we think international education is a national security issue.  Those who are taking potshots at us every day in the press, on the floor of the United States Congress, and in presidential decision directives have decided that it is.

If we want this enterprise of ours to grow and prosper, we have to answer on their terms.  And we have to work skillfully in the policy arena to make sure that our take on international education as a national security issue prevails over theirs.

Ladies and gentlemen, as I stand before you this morning, our community is woefully inadequate to that task.

Let me take you back once more in history--this time, only to about a year ago.  The new American President, George W. Bush, had as one of his highest priorities to move a huge tax cut quickly through the United States Congress.

At that time, the American business community did an awesome thing.  I remember it like it was 5 minutes ago, because I was so struck by it.  The American business community knew four things:

First, it knew it had a big stake in the tax cut--because of course, it was their corporate and personal income taxes that were going to be cut.

Second, it knew that every industry in the United States had special provisions that would benefit that industry that it wanted to get attached to that legislation.

Third, it knew that if the bill became too much of a Christmas tree, loaded down with special-interest provisions, it could fall of its own weight, and no one would get the tax cut.

And fourth, it knew that if that happened, the business community would be blamed.  And if it didn't happen, Bush would remember, and the business community would have some credit in the bank when it wanted to go for those special interest provisions later.

And so the business community came together, under the leadership of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and agreed that every industry would forego its special interest provisions for the sake of keeping the tax cut bill clean and preserving their good relations with the administration, and they'd come back for their goodies later.  And that's exactly what happened.

That's how you advance your interests in Washington.  And the chances that our community could pull off something like that are absolutely zero.  The chances that our community would even know that it should do something like that are not great.

The advocacy business is all about speaking with a coherent voice and acting strategically, on the basis of a sophisticated understanding of the policy process, to achieve outcomes.  Our community hasn't done well at that.  We're too hung up on inter-association jealousies, and on our desire to respond to our own cultures rather than to the policy arena's culture.  We're famous for it.  And I do not exclude my own association from that indictment.

We have to do better.  Higher education is now in the thick of national security discussions.  We're fools if we don't find a way to move beyond our all-too-frequent ineptness, and to speak with a more unified voice on these issues.  No one is interested in our internal politics.  We have to let go of our egos and ask ourselves what really matters in the national security debate.  All of our associations have to step up to the plate and resolve to find a common voice.

Our case is better than we are.  You can sell international education.  You can sell international students and international exchange in the political marketplace.  International education and exchange have done as well as they have because they have essentially sold themselves, despite the absence of an effective, respected lobby.

But those times are gone.  We're in the national security arena now, and that's where the big boys play. We simply have to professionalize our advocacy efforts if we want to survive in that arena.  

And you, the members of our associations, should demand that we do, if you want to win the great debate over international education as a national security issue.

Thank you again for the opportunity, and I look forward to our discussion now and throughout the day.