Remarks of Victor C. Johnson, Associate Executive Director for Public Policy NAFSA: Association of International Educators Delivered at a seminar on: Immigration Policy after September 11 National Chamber Foundation U.S. Chamber of Commerce December 5, 2001 I've been asked to discuss foreign student tracking--a large subject--in 5 minutes--a not-large amount of time.  I'll do my best.  My association is the professional association of international education professionals at the post-secondary level, and I head our small public policy department, which conducts our advocacy efforts on behalf of international education. Our position on foreign student tracking has gone through several permutations over the years.  Since I don't have time to go into all that, let me just say that September 11 ended the debate about foreign student tracking.  It is going to happen, and our job now is to try to help make it work as well as possible.  That's what we're doing. But there's a lot of disinformation floating around about this, and never more so than since September 11.  So let me try to make some quick points.   Our nation has immigration laws.  Enforcing those laws is a good thing.  Those members of our association who work in international student and scholar offices on college and university campuses have for decades cooperated with the INS in enforcing our immigration laws, and have maintained information on foreign students and reported to the INS as required by regulation. Preparations have been underway for the past several years to transfer this information and reporting system to an electronic format.  That is also a good thing.  The development of an electronic reporting system is required by section 641 of IIRAIRA, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, but discussions of such a system predate that act.  Our association has cooperated with the INS in this effort from the beginning. The concept of electronic reporting of information that schools are required to collect and maintain anyway, and any other information for which the government has a legitimate need, is essentially noncontroversial.  The controversy enters in in basically two ways. First, you will notice that I have not yet used the word "terrorism."  In our view, this has nothing to do with terrorism.  It has to do with enforcement of immigration law.  Unfortunately, IIRAIRA introduced the notion that we need to "track" foreign students, to the exclusion of other nonimmigrants, because students somehow have a propensity to engage in acts of terrorism.  With this we have fundamentally disagreed, and we still do.  Labeling foreign students as terrorists made controversial a subject that was not otherwise so. Foreign students constitute less than two percent of those who enter this country annually on nonimmigrant visas, most of whom come in on tourist and business visas.  Foreign students already face more stringent visa requirements than other nonimmigrants, and they are already among the most closely monitored.  Of the 19 September 11 terrorists, only one is known to have entered the United States on a student visa.   The idea that we should respond to terrorism by singling out foreign students for further special monitoring that is not applied to anyone else is insulting to our students and to our profession, and we don't accept it.  It does nothing for our national security to crack down on foreign student visas so long as any terrorist can easily enter the country the same way the other 98 percent of our visitors do.  If we could do away with the ill-informed, anti-terrorist rhetoric that surrounds this issue, much of the controversy would go away. The second reason that foreign student monitoring is controversial is that there are better and worse ways to do it.  Colleges and universities are concerned, as any business would be, about unnecessarily burdensome reporting requirements, and about the cost of upgrading their information systems to comply with those requirements--because this is an unfunded federal mandate. And schools have been concerned--as any business would be--that the system not be constructed in a way that drives away their customers--which, unfortunately, it is.  Under the law, the development and operation of the foreign student tracking system is to be financed by a fee paid by the foreign students.  The INS has set the fee at $95.  But although the government purports to need this money, it can't be bothered to collect it. The original law required that colleges and universities collect the fee from the student and remit it to the government.  Schools were dead set against setting the precedent that they could be fee collectors for the federal government.  And we got the law changed.   But when we tried to propose easy ways for the student to pay the fee at the consulate, at the port of entry, or through direct billing by the INS, we discovered that no agency was willing to take on the responsibility. Everyone has a veto--except the student.  So the worst possible alternative was adopted.  The student will have to pay the fee to an INS-designated bank in the United States, in U.S. dollars, from abroad, before applying for his or her visa.  The system is designed for students who can go on line, pay with a credit card, and receive the receipt by return mail.  But the thousands of foreign students who wish to study here but lack access to a computer, a credit card, or a modern mail system will find it hard to pay the fee. Our universities, like any business, operate in a competitive market.  There is keen competition for foreign students among countries that provide higher education in English.  This business can't operate if the customer is taxed for buying its product and the process for paying the tax looks like it was designed by an IRS official who's having a bad day.   And yes, that has been controversial, and it is to this day.  We think foreign student tracking is a public good and should be paid for with public money.  But failing that, if we could only turn the fee from a unilateral trade barrier imposed on ourselves, into the simple income-generating mechanism that it was intended to be, a lot of the controversy would disappear.  It is important for this country to remain open to foreign students.  By educating successive generations of future world leaders in the United States, we spread goodwill toward the United States throughout the world.  It is a crucial investment in our ability to exercise world leadership.  We nurture our pre-eminence in science by being open to scientific exchange and to the best scientific expertise in the world.  Foreign students, foreign scholars, foreign researchers, foreign teaching assistants--are all integral to higher education in this country, especially in the sciences and in foreign language and area studies.  To erect barriers to their ability to enter the country would be to threaten our national security, not enhance it. Thank you for the opportunity to give you this brief overview of an important issue.  I'll be glad to try to answer your questions.