NAFSA

An open letter to ABC 20/20 from Marlene Johnson, NAFSA Executive Director and CEO

November 20, 2001

David Sloan
Executive Producer
ABC 20/20
Fax: 212-456-1470

RE: November 14 20/20 report on international students

Dear Mr. Sloan,

On November 14, your program aired a grossly unbalanced and inaccurate segment on the topic of international students. Barbara Walters, Lynn Sherr, and producers Audrey Latman and Michael Pressman made no serious attempt to understand the complex issues involved in the question of international student monitoring, or to report them in a responsible and accurate manner. They did a great disservice to your viewers.

I want to respond specifically to the biggest instances of false assumptions, misleading reporting, and patent inaccuracies in the segment.

1) You prominently featured a representative of F.A.I.R. who claimed to have been told repeatedly by unnamed people that the "foreign student visa program is a threat to national security."

That statement, not rebutted in your program, is absurd. No responsible national security official has ever made such a statement in my hearing. In fact, the record is replete with statements to the contrary. To cite just two, former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote in 1998 that "attracting foreign students to study in the U.S. is a win-win-win situation: It's a win for our economy, it's a win for our foreign policy, and it's a win for our educational programs." And current Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that foreign students and scholars "enrich our communities with their academic abilities and cultural diversity, and they return home with an increased understanding and often a lasting affection for the United States. I can think of no more valuable asset to our country than the friendship of future world leaders who have been educated here."

2) You refer to "critics" and "sources" who claim that NAFSA helped to "derail" and "gut" the original student tracking legislation.

Despite the fact that this anonymous attack was directed at NAFSA, you did not have the fairness to air my rebuttal. The absurdity of this allegation is clear from the fact that the original student tracking legislation has never been gutted. It has not been changed in substance, with the sole exception that the Attorney General, rather than the universities, is now required to collect the fee mandated by the law. The law requires full implementation of the tracking system by 2003, a deadline that the INS has testified before Congress that it is on track to meet. Elementary fact checking would have told you this.

3) You cite "congressional investigators," again unnamed, who call the current program a "dumbed -down version of the original,” supposedly due to NAFSA’s lobbying.

For the record (since you again chose not to air my remarks), NAFSA has never lobbied, successfully or unsuccessfully, for a "dumbed-down" version of the program, nor is such a version in place or likely to be.

Airing a few more seconds of my interview would also have informed your audience that NAFSA has not opposed electronic monitoring. Rather, we have been at the table with the INS and Congress from the beginning to develop a workable system. There have been serious concerns about certain requirements of the law and certain INS plans for implementing the program, which NAFSA sought to raise in a responsible way on behalf of its members. We have always done this in a spirit of trying to make the program more, not less, effective. For example, we have been clear in saying that we do not oppose a monitoring program supported by federal funding or by a workable fee collection system.

We are NOT--as your program states--the National Association for Foreign Students and Advisers. We are, as our correct name says, a professional association of international educators. Although we believe strongly that foreign students benefit this country, our members are not foreign students; they are professionals who work in the field of educational exchange, primarily on college and university campuses. We are not a lobby, although three of our fifty employees are registered lobbyists; we are a professional association whose mission is to serve the professional needs of our members and to advance the cause of international education.

We live in dangerous times. September 11 was a wakeup call for all of us. It is a reality that in any group of people, there may be a few individuals who have negative intentions. NAFSA does and will support any effective, responsible measures to keep wrongdoers out of our country and to identify and remove them if they are already here--be they part of the two percent of foreign visitors who enter our country annually on student visas, or the 98 percent who enter on tourist and business visas.

Having said that, it is an incontestible fact that educational exchange in both directions is overwhelmingly a net national security asset for the United States. In upholding the value of such exchange, NAFSA is acting in the highest interests of this country. Your program’s uninformed and irresponsible innuendoes to the contrary unfairly cast aspersions on thousands of dedicated professionals around this country who are as patriotic as any other American.