On Being a Threat to Homeland Security

As the academic year begins at colleges and universities across the country, new students everywhere are doing things for the first time. Even the smallest task can be like a rite of passage. Yet for over half a million international students and scholars enrolled in American universities, this time may involve more than buying textbooks and moving into a first dorm room. In fact, it might also include a considerable number of unexpected setbacks as the immigration laws enacted over the past several years are finally having an impact.

The fact that one of the 9/11 hijackers had been in the U.S. on a student visa has launched several new pieces of major immigration law surrounding international students and scholars. These laws make visa security checks more thorough, tracking of international students more constant, and America less appealing to some of the brightest minds in the world. In fact, a recent study by the Council of Graduate Schools found that the number of international students applying to the nation’s top grad programs has declined by 28 percent.

Getting Here

Because so many of the terrorists entered on visas and were not screened in personal interviews, new laws require most travelers be interviewed. Interviews take a massive amount of manpower, which manifests itself in long waits for visa interview appointments with U.S. consulars around the world. For example, the Saudi Arabia consular advises travelers that they will face a minimum six-week wait, but security checks could take several months; in Seoul, the wait is, on average, thirty days.

Once the appointment is granted, however, the wait for international students and scholars can be even longer. Two programs are currently in place that require certain types of immigrants to have additional security clearances. In these programs, called Visas Mantis and Visas Condor, the applicants’ names are sent to Washington, D.C. and must receive clearance before a visa is granted. The Visas Mantis program distinguishes anyone who is studying or involved with areas on a State Department “Technology Alert List,” or TAL. The list, although it is supposed to be classified, was inadvertently posted on the State Department’s website, according to the Los Angeles Times. As expected, topics that can clearly be construed as possibly terrorism-related, such as nuclear technology, rocket systems, chemical and biotechnology, and biomedical engineering, are on TAL. The Times also reports, however, that at the end of 2003 other areas were added that are less obviously suspect; urban planning, architecture, and housing and civil engineering were added, along with microbiology and physics.

Virtually any area of study can be construed as a potential terrorist threat so activists question the utility of TAL. The level of secrecy surrounding the program, however, makes it difficult to assess its successes and failures. Visa applicants are rarely told whether or not their work falls under a Visas Mantis category. While the State Department maintains that the check usually takes thirty days, ten percent of the 200,000 names they processed in 2003 took more time than that, according to the New York Law Journal. In December 2003, 300 Mantis applicants had been pending for over three months.

International students who are male and between the ages of 16 and 45 and from certain countries face another security clearance hurdle in Visas Condor. Among these countries are those considered "state sponsors of terrorism": Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Sudan. A student or scholar can be subject to both Mantis and Condor and thus experience incredible delays. The Los Angeles Times cites the case of an “Iranian nuclear physicist” who took seventeen months (and a much-delayed academic plan) to get his student visa to come to the United States.