A year ago, Sharik Hasan shared a dream with thousands of 17-year-olds around the world: getting into Oberlin College. He and his friends had spent years taking the tests and making the grades, but still they worried.
“[My friends and I] were all like, ‘we aren’t going to get in anywhere,” Hasan said. “It turned out the tough part was getting the visa.”
Over the past year, the federal government has tightened restrictions on non-citizen aliens like Hasan, as part of its effort to secure the United States from further terrorist acts. Those restrictions have increasingly been affecting Oberlin’s international students.
Hasan, who hails from India, had to wait in line for two grueling, sweltering days to get his visa. He was one of the lucky ones.
“I remember almost everyone in front of me got rejected,” he said. “One after the other — rejected, rejected, rejected.”
Two students who planned to matriculate at Oberlin in September were forced to postpone their enrollment, as they waited for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to process their visas.
Now the INS is requiring international students from 26 countries, primarily those that are largely Muslim, to register with the federal government. Additionally, the agency has created a new database, called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), to keep tabs on international students.
The INS claims that the new regulations are necessary to keep America safe in a post-Sept. 11 world. Some at Oberlin, however, fear that the new regulations will do more harm than good.
“I’m afraid that it’s going to make international citizens hesitant to come to the United States, and that if they do they will feel less than welcomed,” Associate Dean of Students Ellen Sayles said.
Sayles is not alone in her fears. Introducing Monday’s convocation speaker, the Rev. Gardner Calvin Taylor, President Nancy Dye expressed grave misgivings about the government’s latest restrictions on international students.
“I am very concerned about the registration program,” Dye told the Review. “Some aspects of the SEVIS program, as well as the growing difficulty of students around the world to get visas to study in the United States, seem to be a real effort to just discourage international students from coming to the United States, which I think is terribly counterproductive. It’s not good for Americans, it’s not good for the rest of the world. The US should do all it can to open its doors.”
Although the legislation to create SEVIS was passed in 1996, Congress only allocated the funds for it after Sept. 11, when investigations exposed the INS’s lackadaisical policing of the student visa system.
Two of the Sept. 11 hijackers were posthumously granted visas to study in the United States. Spurred by that revelation, investigators found that a number of foreigners had been granted student visas, but had never enrolled where they said they would.
“There were other things besides students not showing up,” Sayles said. “There were institutions who had approval to issue I-20 documents [which are required of international students] who were no longer in existence, schools issuing I-20s who were not licensed to issue I-20s. There was a lot of looseness.” With SEVIS, the INS intends to prevent similar confusion from happening in the future. Colleges will be required to inform the INS if international students do not enroll within 30 days of when they’re supposed to.
The hijackers’ student visas had not come from four-year colleges like Oberlin. According to Dye, Oberlin has never lost track of an international student whom it had granted a visa.
Sayles doesn’t think that SEVIS itself will have much of a negative effect on international Obies.
“From what I know for SEVIS right now, it’s not going to impact our students in any substantial way. It actually impacts the administrative process of the international office more than it will affect students.”
Sayles fears that further restrictions on international students may not be long in coming, however.
“I’m concerned about the civil liberties and SEVIS concerns me less than the broader policies,” she said. “I’m concerned about the special registration that certain students are going to have to undergo. I’m concerned about the possibility that our government is going to further restrict civil liberties.”
“If they start adding more countries to this list of special registration from our list of countries that have international students, that’s going to be a big change,” she added.
Dye, who attended college in the 1960’s, said that the current climate reminds her of the government’s Vietnam-era excesses, when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover would spy on American students.
“In the Vietnam War, the United States was not feeling secure within its borders,” Dye said.
“That is what’s driving a lot of what’s going on now. People have to think very clearly and carefully about what we’re doing. Yes, it is necessary to keep America secure, to keep the boundaries of the U.S. secure. It is also essential that you try to do that without really repressive actions that are targeted to certain ethnic racial and religious groups.”