Potential laws may affect foreign students
When Pardhasaradhi Manyala boarded a plane from his native India to the United States last year, he knew he was among a fortunate few.
Like many of his peers, he had braved the long, snaking queues outside the American Consulate in the south-Indian city of Chennai in the hope that his five minutes at the interviewer’s window would make the wait worthwhile.
The young engineer was admittedly nervous.
“Visa approvals have become quite random these days,” Manyala said. “Rejections are increasing.”
Rumors place the refusal rate in India at a staggering 95 percent.
Manyala held his breath as he waited his turn at the window.
Fortunately for him, luck smiled, and he received a visa to attend graduate school at Utah State University.
Manyala isn’t the only international student counting his blessings.
Wu Qiang hails from Shenyang, China, another country caught in the grip of tightened visa screening.
The mechanical engineer is grateful his attempt was a first-time success.
“After 9-11, to my knowledge, some majors — chemistry, physics, mathematics and some branches of engineering, are being seen as sensitive. Our backgrounds are routinely checked,” Wu said. “This takes at least a month.”
And sometimes longer.
“A friend of mine specializing in fluid mechanics had to wait four months before she got her visa,” Wu said. “She was accepted to Utah State in the fall of 2002 but had to defer her admission by a semester.”
Entering the country is half the problem. Students from China are issued visas that stay valid for six months only. If they leave the United States to return home for the holidays, they need to reapply for visas to make it back to school — a process that, students say, isn’t easy.
“Some people get rejected and can’t finish their degrees,” Wu said.
No matter which country, the trend is uniform: It’s a lot tougher now for students from other countries to pursue an education in the United States than it was before September 2001.
This has the Association of International Educators, or NAFSA, concerned.
The organization’s Consular Affairs Working Group has established a network of liaisons for each region of the world to receive input from member institutions on problems encountered in visa issuance, according to its Web site.
“As a national organization, we are trying to assist students experiencing problems with visa denials or delays,” said Negar C. Davis, director of USU’s Office of International Students and Scholars. “We cannot sit back and watch as embassies [make arbitrary decisions]. There is a state of confusion within embassies around the world.”
These intensely political decisions have hurt international-student enrollment at universities across the country.
“The entire process has been delayed,” Davis said. “It has damaged some universities in terms of graduate-student enrollment. We are just now beginning to analyze our own statistics, and from the surface, I can say that we have a few students who could not get visas and have deferred admission.”
A few could well mean quite a few.
“This semester, in the electrical engineering department, we have only about two or three new [Indian] students as opposed to 53 last fall,” Manyala said.
Stringent screening overseas is one part of a series of measures launched by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to better monitor international students in school and exchange programs. Beginning Jan. 30, universities across the country will begin using the INS’s new $38 million Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, to further secure the process.
“SEVIS is a simple, electronic, rather than a paper-based, information system,” Davis explained. “In the past, we used to send and receive student information by mail. Now, we’re looking at a much faster system.”
Efficient though it may be, the upgrade comes at a difficult time.
“One major obstacle to implementing SEVIS is that it is going to affect our budget,” Davis said. “On the one hand, we’re dealing with budget cuts, and on the other, we have to spend on this system.”
She isn’t saying how much the move will cost the university.
“Initially, this is going to be labor-intensive. For example, we need staff for data entry, but we’re not adding any positions yet, so I can’t say how much it will cost us,” Davis said.
NAFSA is questioning the delays in preparing and publishing the SEVIS directive.
“The significant delays have done a disservice to exchange and higher-education committees who sponsor exchange visitors,” CEO Marlene M. Johnson wrote in a recent letter to the Department of State. “The rule provides little more than six weeks’ notice to organizations and institutions which must now design and implement complex technical systems and develop new business practices to meet major new federal mandates.”
Davis agrees.
“In 1993 [after the first attack on the World Trade Center], when we started talking about immigration reform, people didn’t want to push it [SEVIS] any further,” she said. “Since Sept. 11, the push became stronger, and suddenly, within a year, here we are.”
Budgetary concerns notwithstanding, SEVIS is a step in the right direction, Davis said.
“It will streamline the process,” she added. “In the long run, it will be a handy way of handling student visas.”
Handy systems are what America needs to remain competitive in the multibillion-dollar international-student market, lest it loses some of the brightest to other countries. Like Germany.
“More and more Indian students are beginning to look to Germany for advanced degrees,” Manyala said. “Some universities there even offer free tuition.”
But what about the language barrier?
“That hasn’t been too much of a problem,” he said.
–leon@cc.usu.edu