Statement of Marlene M. Johnson
Executive Director and CEO
NAFSA: Association of International Educators

NAFSA-INS SEVIS Demonstration and Press Briefing
NAFSA 54th Annual Conference          San Antonio, Texas     
May 29, 2002

Good afternoon, and welcome to this unusual demonstration of government-private sector cooperation in action.

NAFSA is the professional association of people who are engaged in educational exchange at the post-secondary level. Among our more than 8,000 members are several thousand people who staff international student and scholar offices at colleges and universities. Many of these people are Designated School Officials under INS regulations, and much of the responsibility for the reporting that you are about to see demonstrated will fall to them.

The demonstration you will see is scheduled to be shown at nine different times throughout this conference, so that all of our members who need to know this information will have a chance to see it. This is an unprecedented effort on our part to partner with the INS to make sure that the information that educators will need to comply with the reporting and monitoring requirements will be made widely available to them. I want to take this opportunity to thank the INS for making people available for these demos.

Although unprecedented in its magnitude, however, this is very far from being the first example of NAFSA-INS collaboration on international-student monitoring. Indeed, the image of a conflict between a higher education community opposed to monitoring and an INS charged with implementing it does not reflect reality. While there has been debate concerning the policy issues raised by the legislation requiring monitoring, the underlying reality is one of cooperation at the level of implementation. And in that sense, our collaboration at this conference really isn't unprecedented at all.

Let me run through some facts that haven't been widely reported.

Schools have for decades been required by INS regulations to collect and maintain information on their international students. Schools have for decades reported that information to the INS as required by regulation. As the international student population grew – it has increased more than ten-fold since 1960 – it became impossible for the INS to manage a paper reporting system; the INS suspended much of the reporting because it couldn't keep up with the blizzard of paper. But there is little if any information that SEVIS will require us to report that schools don't already collect and maintain in their files. Except for the technology and the magnitude, this isn't new for us.

As I'm sure you know, it was a 1996 law that required the creation of an international-student monitoring system by 2003. What is less widely known is that before 1996, a NAFSA-INS task force was already working on changing the international-student data system from a paper to an electronic format. Every year since then, at our invitation, INS officials have participated in our annual conferences--and in many of our regional conferences--to brief our members on the development of the monitoring system and to get feedback from them. 

More than three years ago - in February 1999 - NAFSA leaders met with INS officials at INS headquarters and agreed to establish several joint task forces to facilitate implementation of student monitoring. This past January, the president of our association appointed a national coordinator for SEVIS implementation, charged with coordinating all of our association's resources to ensure that we were giving our members all possible assistance in implementing this system. Our SEVIS implementation coordinator is in regular communication with the INS, as is the NAFSA staff. 

It's important for you to know that higher education does have a record of cooperation and collaboration with the INS in implementing international-student monitoring - not just since September 11, but all the way back to the beginning.

I think it’s also important to put this monitoring system into some context. As higher education professionals, our community has as much interest as anyone in protecting the United States’ ability to maintain an open immigration system, and in helping the government to crack down on abuses to that system. But let us be clear: what our country faces is a problem related to immigration and border security; it is not, despite the headlines, a student problem. Indeed, as Secretary of State Colin Powell and others have noted, legitimate international students and scholars in our country are not a security threat – they are a crucial foreign-policy asset. (There is much more on that subject in the materials you received from us this afternoon.) 

It is not widely known that less than two percent of the more than 30 million people who enter this country every year on temporary visas come in on student visas. Another one percent comes in on exchange visitor visas. The other 97 percent come in on tourist or business visas – as did all but one of the September 11 terrorists. Except for a new system that will record their entry into and exit from the United States, no one is suggesting monitoring the whereabouts of 97 percent of our temporary visitors while they're here. Only students and exchange visitors are being singled out for monitoring on the scale of SEVIS. 

The higher education community is committed to doing its part and complying with the law. We support the government’s efforts to prevent individuals with harmful intentions from entering our country. SEVIS is part of those efforts, and we support it. But it simply does not make sense to focus scrutiny uniquely on the relatively small population of foreign visitors in our country who are international students and scholars, when tens of millions of other visitors are not here to study and therefore will not be tracked by SEVIS. 

As we move forward with implementing SEVIS, both the higher education community and our partners at the INS recognize that we have before us a very compressed timeframe. Bear with me as I get into some technical but important specifics. What you will see in today’s demo is the "web-interactive" reporting system, which schools with relatively small numbers of international students will use. 

Schools with large numbers of international students will need another method called "batch reporting," which is designed to enable their systems to communicate with and transmit information in large "batches" to SEVIS. This will be a critical tool for universities and colleges with large international student enrollments. INS has indicated to us that they recognize that the batch method of reporting will be an essential component for those schools.

The complete technical specifications for the batch method are not yet available. Again, let me stress: Schools are eager to comply. They will work around the clock to do so, once the final technical specifications have been made available and vendors and information technology staffs on campuses nationwide can work to integrate their systems with SEVIS. 

This is a massive undertaking. One of the things both educators and INS are trying to get a handle on is the time it will take for schools to put in place the necessary programs and software to link their information systems to the full SEVIS system. As you know, the INS recently released regulations pertaining to the implementation and compliance timeline for SEVIS. In its proposed rule, the INS asked us to comment on these issues, and we will do so. 

Thank you again for coming. I look forward to your questions after the demonstration.