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ARTICLE
Closed Borders and Closed Minds: Immigration Policy Changes After 9/11
And U.S. Higher Education
M. Allison Witt
University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
Amidst the spectacular losses of 9/11 and the
tremendous ongoing ramifications of wars, security overhauls, loss of
liberties and freedoms, as well as dire economic consequences, policy
shifts affecting U.S.
higher education have occurred
quietly, largely unnoticed by the popular press or the American public,
yet the implications for colleges and universities, and the public they
serve, are dramatic and far-reaching.
Despite the increasing interconnectedness of our world, evident
in politics, economics and the environment, post 9/11 policy changes
increasingly isolate U.S.
higher education from the outside world, hampering academic freedom,
stifling outside viewpoints, and consequently, allowing American
hegemony an unchallenged stronghold.
This paper will discuss the policy changes affecting nonimmigrant
student visas, international research collaborations, and visiting
scholar visas within the historical context of American higher education
and within the current debate on immigration policy in the U.S.
Implications for diversity, academic freedom, and the decreasing
potential for diverging views and counter-perspectives within academia
will be discussed.
Closed Borders and Closed Minds: Immigration Policy Changes after 9/11
and U.S. Higher Education
Amidst the spectacular losses of 9/11 and the
tremendous ongoing ramifications of wars, security overhauls, loss of
liberties and freedoms, as well as dire economic consequences, policy
shifts effecting US higher education have occurred quietly, largely
unnoticed by the popular press or the American public, yet the
implications for colleges and universities, and the public they serve,
are dramatic and far reaching.
Despite the increasing interconnectedness of our world, evident
in politics, economics and the environment, post 9/11 policy changes
increasingly isolate U.S.
higher education from the outside world, hampering academic freedom,
stifling outside viewpoints, and consequently, allowing American
hegemony an unchallenged stronghold.
This paper will discuss the policy changes affecting nonimmigrant
student visas, international research collaborations and visiting
scholar visas within the historical context of American higher education
and within the current debate on immigration policy in the
US. Implications for diversity,
academic freedom, and the decreasing potential for diverging views and
counter perspectives within academia will be discussed.
Policy Change
In response to the 9/11 terrorists attacks,
President Bush issued a Homeland Security Directive in October of 2001
calling for measures to end “abuse of student visas” and prevention of
“certain international students from receiving education and training in
sensitive areas” (U. S. Office of the President, 2001, para. 12).
This directive came on the heels of the Patriot Act, which had
already called for the full implementation, and even expansion, of the
controversial Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility
Act of 1996.
Together these acts set in motion a complete
rewriting of immigration policy regarding international students seeking
higher education in the U.S. The terms “certain . . .
students” and “abuse of student visas were broadly interpreted and
widely applied. So broadly, in fact, that all of the more than 550,000
international students who annually enter the United States to begin
study were affected, in addition to all the millions of students
currently in degree-seeking status.
When international students were first classified
in U.S. immigration law under the
Immigration Act of 1924, they were admitted as non-quota immigrants.
Since students come for a temporary sojourn and not for permanent
residence, the Immigration Act of 1952 reclassified students as
nonimmigrant (Alien Students, 1980). The underlying assumption was that
intending immigrants would use student visas as a means to enter the
country, or would try to stay in the U.S.
after the completion of study. The burden of proof was on each applicant
to establish eligibility for this nonimmigrant status by demonstrating
significant ties to the home country in the form of residence,
employment goals, or family members remaining at home. This burden of
proof shifted over time to encompass the political goals of the day. In
the Cold War, international students in the U.S.
were assumed to be spies. Now, with the recent passage of the
intelligence reform act, they are assumed to be terrorists until they
can prove otherwise. All applicants to
U.S. colleges are currently subject to interviews
at U.S.
consulates abroad where they will be expected to prove that they are not
intending to immigrate and that they are not intending terrorist
action while in the
U.S.
Even after this interview, all of the international students are now
tracked and monitored throughout their course of study.
Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS)
Because of the post 9/11 Presidential directive,
the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) tracking
system was quickly implemented, which resulted in a number of drastic
changes in the immigration process for international applicants,
international students, and American universities. The SEVIS system is
an electronic database that universities must use and update, which
screens and tracks every international student applicant and every
international student enrolled. For example, to admit an international
student, the university must enter a few pages of detailed data about
the student into the government’s Internet-based database. Then, the
university tracks all of the student’s actions for the government, from
entry to and exit of the country, course enrollment, address changes, to
even personal financial information. To meet the January 2003 deadline,
universities had to quickly hire and train employees that could fulfill
these secure data entry requirements. Funding and staffing shortages
often required complete restructuring of international admissions
offices. In a 2002 hearing before the Subcommittee on 21st
Century Competitiveness, the American Association of State Colleges and
Universities complained of the sudden and ongoing cost to institutions,
including “training, software licenses, staffing and other attendant
maintenance” (U.S. Congress, 2002a, pp. 107-79,142).
But universities weren’t the only ones scrambling
to fulfill the government mandate. The State Department was also caught
understaffed and unprepared to implement the new system.
Consular offices around the world had to immediately institute
numerous changes in processing and phase in the new system.
In a 2003 Performance and Accountability Report released by the
Bureau of Resource Management, Consular Affairs was found to be
deficient in the “fundamental readjustment regarding visa issuance”
(U.S. Department of State, 2003, Section 1).
The Office of Inspector General recommended, among many other
changes, that the department “assess and reallocate consular workloads
worldwide” (U.S. Department of State, 2003, Section 2).
As a consequence of such major internal overhauls
within the Consular Affairs offices, international students were forced
to endure long delays in visa issuance. Some students were trapped in
their home country as consular offices transitioned. Yang Wang’s story
is typical: Wang, a doctoral
student at Stanford, returned home to
China
for a three week-visit to his parents in December 2002. He was forced to
stay for 11 months while
Washington
conducted a security check on him before issuing his return visa (Zhao,
2004). Xiaomei Jiang, a doctoral student in physics at the
University
of Utah, rushed home to China
after her parents were killed in a car accident.
She was not allowed to return to the U.S.
for nine months, causing her to miss the defense of her thesis (Zhao,
2004). Others waited months and in some cases years for visa approval to
come. And then it didn’t. After waiting, students could still be denied,
and without explanation. Six months after applying, Jane Wang, admitted
to Ohio
State, heard that her case had been
mysteriously closed, forcing her to reapply and begin the indefinite
wait all over again (Zhao, 2004).
Historical Context
Although the Chinese represent just 11 percent of
foreign students in the
United States, 57 percent of serious
delays involved Chinese students. Indian and Russian students have also
been subject to long waits. Male students from Arab or Muslim countries
make up another large group of delayed applications, as they are all
subject to additional rounds of security checks. This type of monitoring
actually dates back to the 1950’s and escalated throughout the Cold War
when the U.S. wanted to prevent the transfer
of technology to Communist countries. However, consulates at that time
seldom scrutinized the backgrounds of students on the scale that is
being done today (Zhao, 2004). Still, foreign students were
traditionally viewed as potential agents of espionage throughout the
Cold War era.
In April of 1966, former Senator William Benton
addressed the American
Academy of Political and Social Science
on the subject of “Education as an Instrument of Foreign Policy,” and
the speech was later submitted to the Senate for the record regarding
the International Education Act.
Benton delineates the “grim Soviet devotion to
education.” The Soviets were
accused of a “direct attack” on America
by publishing educational texts in chemistry, biology, engineering and
even the
U.S.
itself. Further, the U.S.S.R. was encouraging underdeveloped nations to
“follow [the Soviet] educational model” (U.S. Senate, 1966, pp. 503-9).
During the Cold War, foreign students from
communist countries were all viewed by sectors of the government as
potential, even likely, spies.
In a 1988 Department of Defense report, all 15,000 Chinese
students in the U.S. at that time were considered
potential “hostile intelligence threats.”
In addition, the report documents 60 institutions of higher
education that the FBI believed were the subject of focused Soviet
efforts to gather intelligence (U.S. Department of Defense, 1988).
Perhaps one of the most extreme examples of the
politicization of international students occurred during the Carter
administration, when U.S.
embassy workers were taken hostage in Iran. Iranian students whose visas
had lapsed were ordered deported by President Carter from U.S. higher education institutions
as a retaliatory gesture. At that time, U.S. higher education responded in
the traditionally decentralized manner, with each institution choosing
its own response. One institution, Greenville Technical College in
Greenville, S.C., took justice into its own hands and suspended all 104
Iranian students and told them they could not return until the American
hostages were released (Nunes, 1979). Robert C. Crawford, vice chairman
of the state school’s board of regents, boldly stated that the “punitive
action” was “intended that way” and further justified his punishment of
innocent Iranian students by explaining that “there are some innocent
people in the U.S. Embassy, too”. The Greenville
Technical College
response, however, stands out as an anomaly during the crisis. Most
international educators deplored the President’s order and some
universities, such as UCLA and USC, prohibited
immigration service agents from conducting on-campus interviews with
Iranian students (Nunes, 1979).
Though the deportations were intended as
retaliatory and punitive, the threat of deporting Iranian students from
the U.S. had no bearing on the final release of the
American hostages in
Iran. Perhaps the most lasting impact
of the ordered deportation was the precedent it set of using
international students as leverage against terrorist acts.
Even before 9/11, research conducted by and with
foreign students and scholars had become the subject of scrutiny.
In fact, by March of 2000, Congress moved the oversight of
satellite technology from the Commerce Department to the State
Department, causing all basic research in scientific satellites, related
data, software, and components to be considered military munitions so
that universities were required to apply for export licenses if they
wanted to include foreign students or researchers in related projects.
The Association of American Universities lobbied President Clinton
against the change, explaining that the regulations were “having an
adverse impact on university research” (Abel, 2000, para. 11). Eugene
Skolnikoff, an MIT professor specializing in technology transfers
complained of the resulting “climate of fear,” for academics, many who
feared “prosecution for even the unintentional transfer of unclassified
data, such as in a phone conversation, with scientists from blacklisted
countries, including China, Taiwan, Israel, Pakistan, and India” (Abel,
2000, para. 9).
The climate of fear surrounding international
students and academic exchange that lingered in the post-Cold War era
greatly intensified after the policy changes made after 9/11. Of course,
the 9/11 attacks were in no way precipitated by communists or in any way
linked to Communism.
Moreover, none of the drastic measures taken to monitor students in the
post-9/11 era would have had any deterring effect.
To illustrate, only one of the 19 9/11 hijackers
entered the country on a student visa.
Hani Hasan Hanjour, a 26-year-old Saudi national, entered the U.S. on a nonimmigrant student visa.
He did not, however, seek an advanced degree at a higher education
institution, but instead, entered the country ostensibly to study
English at an
ESL Language
Center in
California (Borjas, 2002). Even if the SEVIS
system had been operable at the time, Hanjour would have presumably been
able to do so, though perhaps with some delay. Since the State
Department had no previous record of him in their database check system,
he would likely have been approved for study. He was not currently
enrolled in classes at the time of the attack, so he would have been
noted in the SEVIS database as out-of-status for non-attendance, but
that would not likely have resulted in any immediate action.
In fact, in February of 2003, the Office of the Inspector General
(OIG) found that while the INS removed 92 percent of deported aliens who
were detained, it removed only 13 percent of aliens who were not
detained (i.e., incarcerated).
Moreover, the INS removed only six percent of non-detained aliens
with final deportation papers from countries identified by the U.S.
Department of State as sponsors of terrorism (i.e., Cuba, Iran, Iraq,
Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria) (U.S. Department of Justice,
2003). Saudi Arabia,
the home country for 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers is not on the list.
None of the other 18 hijackers of 9/11 entered the country on student
visas, so the SEVIS system would not have tracked them at all.
Nonimmigrant Student and Exchange Visas within the Immigration Debate
Student visas actually make up a small percentage
of people entering the
United States
every year. For example, in 2001, only 8.2% of nonimmigrant visas were
given to students. Visitors for tourism and business comprised the
largest group of nonimmigrant visa holders. The Department of Homeland
Security Yearbook of Immigration Statistics reports over 32.8 million
entries into the U.S.
in 2001 (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2003).
An estimated 32.5 million foreign-born people reside in the
U.S., with one million more achieving
legal permanent resident status every year. In addition, between seven
and eight million enter the U.S. illegally each year (Wasem,
2003). Clearly, the 550,000
entering International students in higher education are by far the most
monitored and screened group of aliens in the country, though they are
also one of the smallest groups.
If the implementation of
SEVIS could not prevent the “abuse of student visas,” by terrorists,
could it prevent “certain international students from receiving
education and training in sensitive areas”?
In May 2002, the State Department
sent a memo to all American visa officers, asking them to watch for
applicants whose area of study appeared on the “technology alert list,”
or the “sensitive major list” (Zhao, 2004).
The list is another remnant of the Cold War era, in which over 150
concentrations appear.
Again, broad interpretation led to sweeping effects, as “sensitive
areas” is expanded to include topics as seemingly innocuous as urban
planning and landscape design.
Students from other parts of the world who have backgrounds in
the social sciences or the humanities are not subject to the same
scrutiny, nor are most undergraduate students who have yet to declare
majors. Theoretically, then,
anyone could pursue sensitive technology if the study began at the
undergraduate level, or if he or she changed majors after arrival.
Again, this would be noted in SEVIS, but not likely acted on by
the Department of Homeland Security.
If the policy shifts could not prevent terrorism,
what then, could have been their purpose?
If we review the highly publicized current debate on immigration
policy affecting both legal and illegal immigrants, the contrast of
relative silence with regard to nonimmigrant visa policy is striking.
By contrasting the two groups, several key differences emerge.
First, nonimmigrant students applying to U.S.
universities must begin the process months and even many years in
advance. As anyone who has
applied to universities in the
U.S.
knows, several tests must be taken, numerous forms must be completed,
and fees must be paid. The
applicants, then, are a self-selected group who are willing to take on
the arduous tasks assigned to them by what is often a large bureaucracy,
a university admissions office.
Furthermore, they are a group that is as a whole, financially
well-off, considering the continually escalating costs of higher
education. Even if the
student has received a scholarship or fellowship, the costs associated
with travel and relocation are not insignificant.
In short, non-immigrant student visa holders are by and large a
rule-abiding, financially well off group willing to jump through
bureaucratic hoops to achieve a long-term goal.
Therefore, policing them is merely a matter of making rules that
they will then follow.
University applicants’ tendency towards compliance makes them an easy
target for regulation.
Moreover, as mentioned earlier, they are a small
group, hailing from all over the world.
They speak countless languages and come from numerous cultural
backgrounds. These variances
make it less likely that they can unite in a voice of protest over
changes in immigration policy.
Further, as non-immigrants, problems with U.S.
visas are a temporary problem for them.
They do not expect to struggle with student visa problems for
more than a few years, making the situation one that they tend to wait
out rather than work to change.
For all the above reasons, it is unlikely, then,
that students themselves will protest the policy changes, but what about
the universities who have admitted and in many cases, recruited these
students from around the world? Unlike previous government attempts at
intervention with international students on campuses, administrators and
educators did not, or could not, resist policy changes.
In fact , after 9/11, the entire landscape of international
education in the U.S.
shifted dramatically from a posture of recruitment, to one of determent,
from receptive to suspicious, from hospitable to hostile.
Post-9/11, university educators and administrators
became far more compliant with government surveillance of international
students than they were with past attempts at governmental interference
on campus. Even professional
higher education organizations in international education that had
formerly resisted legislation hindering international students submitted
to the fear and paranoia of the immediate post-9/11 arena and in some
cases, actually came out in tempered support of legislation they had
spent the previous five years battling.
For example, in April of 2001, The American Council
on Education (ACE), a membership organization of college presidents of
1,800 institutions and 76 other educational and exchange visitor
organizations, sent a letter to the INS rejecting CIPRIS, an earlier
prototype of SEVIS, calling its potential implementation a “looming
disaster” for higher education (Southwick, 2001).
Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public
affairs for the ACE, claimed that the program would “have the effect of
closing off options for many foreign students who might want to study in
the U.S.”
(Southwick, 2001). College
lobbyists accurately predicted that the database, and the fee collected
from students to finance it, would “hurt the enrollment of international
students and be an unfair hardship to those from the poorest countries”
(Southwick, 2001). But by
September 24, 2002, in a Joint House Subcommittee hearing, David Ward,
President of ACE, called SEVIS “the single most important step that the
federal government can take,” and went on to state that “we strongly
support SEVIS and would like to see it implemented as soon as possible.”
Regarding the fee, he complained that the amount and collection
procedure were still unsettled, but did not take issue with the fee
itself or the burden it would create for students (U.S. Congress,
2002b). This dramatic shift in stance characterizes the post-9/11 era in
higher education policy and distinguishes it from past attempts to limit
“certain students from receiving higher education.”
Impact of the Policy Change
Now, several years after the sweeping post-9/11
immigration changes,
U.S.
higher education institutions are down an average of over 30% in
international applications (Council of Graduate Schools, 2004).
The decrease spans regions of the world and disciplines within
the institutions themselves, showing a dramatic overall, worldwide
decrease in international student interest toward U.S. colleges and universities
(Council of Graduate Schools, 2004).
In addition, the number of foreign students on American campuses
“declined [in 2003] by 2.4 percent – the first drop in foreign
enrollment since the 1971-1972 academic year” (Bollag, 2004).
A survey of major graduate institutions, conducted by the Council
of Graduate Schools, found a six percent decline in new foreign
enrollments for the fall semester of 2004, making it the third year in a
row with a substantial drop in new students (Bollag, 2004).
Experts tend to agree on the reasons for the
decline, “chiefly the real and perceived difficulties in obtaining
student visas, especially in scientific and technical fields” (Bollag,
2004). According to
Nils Hasselmo, president of the Association of
American Universities, "the major factors are U.S. visa policy,
increased international competition and perceptions that the United
States is no longer a welcoming country" (Foreign Grad Students
in U.S. Down, 2004).
In fact, at the same
moment that the U.S.
began to implement the immigration policy changes, other English
speaking countries or nations with English language higher education
programs stepped up their efforts to recruit international students.
"Many countries, like the United Kingdom,
South Africa, Germany
and Australia are
recruiting the same students we are after, and some students are finding
these places more attractive," says Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice
president of the ACE (Foreign grad students in
U.S.
down, 2004). Indeed, the enrollment of
students from China in Australian colleges grew by 25 percent
and students from
India
by 31 percent last fall, compared with a year ago. In England, the number of Chinese
students grew by 36 percent and Indian students, by 16 percent. “Not
surprisingly, universities in Australia, Britain, France and elsewhere
are taking advantage of our barriers and are aggressively recruiting
these students,” writes Robert M. Gates, former director of Central
Intelligence and current President of Texas A&M (2004).
While it is tempting to
blame all of the decline in international applications to U.S. higher
education institutions on SEVIS and its regulations, researchers had
noted that the U.S. has been “losing market share” since the 1980’s.
While the total number of foreign students at U.S. institutions grew
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. continued to slip from about 40
percent of market share in the 1980s to just 32 percent by 1998 (Panel
to Study Whether U.S. Laws and Regulations are Deterring Foreign
Students, 1999). In contrast, other nations
were expanding their hold on the international education market. As
early as 1998, Great Britain
announced an aggressive, well funded marketing plan, backed by changes
in visa regulations that would make it easier for foreign students to
enter and work in the
U.K.
The strategy’s stated goal was to attract 75,000 more foreign students (Panel
to Study Whether U.S. Laws and Regulations are Deterring Foreign
Students, 1999). This plan is in sharp
contrast to the U.S.,
where international students were traditionally viewed as a “problem”
for the faculty and institutions (Jenkins, 1983). In fact, “instead of
being seen as individuals, foreign students in United States colleges
and universities tended to become identified by their problems and
classified under the generic term ‘foreign student’” (Jenkins, 1983).
Before 9/11, educators
within higher education fought this tendency and organized to protect
and encourage foreign students on campuses across the country. As early
as the 1980s, experts in the field of international education bragged
that
the persons involved in
foreign student affairs are much more effective in dealing with their
responsibilities. Thus,
foreign students . . . find that they are no longer treated as a
stereotype . . . but greeted as individuals who bring with them their
own cultural heritage, have their own capabilities, and pursue their own
particular goals. (Jenkins, 1983)
After 9/11, however, all
international students were again being lumped into one category:
terrorists.
The economic implications for the loss of
international students to the
United States are extensive.
International education ranks as the nation’s fifth largest
service sector export, and represents a 13 billion dollar annual
industry (Foreign Graduate Students in U.S. Down, 2004).
But the economic impact is only one measure of the loss for the
United States.
More difficult to quantify, but also more significant, is the
loss in diversity at the student and even the faculty level.
The State Department has expanded its focus on
students outward to encompass foreign faculty as well, most notably in a
case in August, 2004, in which Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim scholar
from Switzerland, had his visa revoked
just before he was to begin teaching at Notre Dame.
The State Department cited a legal provision that bans anyone
“likely to engage in any terrorist activity,” but scholars at Notre Dame
feared instead that it was Mr. Ramadan’s views, “not an extremist
discourse but one that is critical of U.S. policy,” which lead to the
decision (Kinzer, 2004). The
director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies,
Scott Appleby, said that he “worr[ied] about the implications for
academic freedom and more generally for freedom of speech. . .” (Kinzer,
2004). Mr. Ramadan’s case is not
unique. Academic and
civil-liberties groups assert that during the last year or so, the Bush
administration has increased its use of security measures to keep out
foreign scholars whose politics or ideas it does not want the American
public to hear: The
government typically does not give a reason for denying the visas,
making it nearly impossible to challenge the decision (Bollag, 2007).
Because of
the difficulty in obtaining visas to the
U.S., international collaborations are
being driven overseas.
Research and academic-based conferences, which include, for example, “75
national academies and 27 scientific unions” from the International
Council for Science, are holding their conferences outside the
U.S.
to avoid visa delays for participants (Kinzer, 2004).
Among the U.S.- based collaborations that have already suffered
“is the particle physics project at the Fermi Lab—many team members,
especially Chinese and Russians, cannot enter the country” (Kinzer,
2004). In one notable case,
Russian physicists enrolled in a training program on safeguarding
nuclear weapons were unable to get visas to attend the class (Chul,
2003).
The resulting isolation for American students and
scholars creates a disconnected environment where it becomes
increasingly difficult to clearly view, teach, debate or scrutinize
American global dominance from inside American academic culture. With a
limited presence of international students in the classroom, and with
participation in international academic and research-based
collaborations limited, the dominant American culture is free to fix a
common worldview that does not problematize the role of American culture
globally, or consider the global effects of U.S.
government policies. As Peter McLaren
points out, “Americans are generally positioned as subjects by dominant
discourse” (Darder, Boltadano & Torres, p. 77).
Indeed, he goes on to explain that,
Most Americans would be aghast at hearing a
description of their country as a terrorist regime exercising covert
acts of war against Latin American countries such as
Nicaragua.
The prevailing image of America
that the schools . . . have promulgated is a benevolent one in which the
interests of the dominant classes supposedly represent the interests of
all groups. (78)
Such limited viewpoints can rest unchallenged when
students from other nations, Nicaragua for example, are not in
the classroom and cannot submit their own experience as a
counter-perspective.
Moreover, when educators, scientists and researchers are hampered in
efforts to work collaboratively internationally, the international
impact of their work is less likely to be fully understood, or in some
cases, even considered.
Recently, struggling with these limitations,
U.S.
educators have renewed their call to Congress and the administration to
address this issue. The
National Association of Foreign Student Advisors (NAFSA) has called on
President Bush to convene a White House conference of senior officials
from the government, higher education, and the private sector to
elaborate a national strategy on international education” (Bollag,
2004). Indeed, NAFSA is
calling for a government-wide recruitment policy for international
students, a removal of government barriers for student visas, a program
of loans to assist with tuition costs, and a central Web portal
explaining the complexities of the
U.S.
higher education system (Bollag, 2004).
“All of our competitors have long since implemented strategies to
recruit foreign students,” according to Victor C. Johnson, associate
executive director for public policy at NAFSA. “It’s time for us to
enter the race” (Bollag, 2004).
The alarming declines in applications reported by CGS
-member graduate schools are in areas critical to maintaining the
scientific enterprise and economic competitiveness of our country as
well as the cultural and intellectual diversity that contributes to the
international renown of U.S.
graduate education. (Council of Graduate Schools [CGS] (2004),
president, Debra Stewart)
For their part, the current administration claims
their goal is “to remain a welcoming nation to foreign scholars and
scientists. . . “ (Schemo, 2003).
In a written statement responding to the recent drop in
International students on U.S. campuses, Patricia S. Harrison, the U.S.
assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, said
she was confident, “that both the situation and numbers will improve” (Bollag,
2004). Asa Hutchinson,
under-secretary for border and transportation security at the Department
of Homeland Security, said they “recognize the need for greater
cooperation and were taking steps to reduce the [visa processing]
delays” (Shemo, 2003).
Even with the practical issues of visa delays
aside, the prevailing negative image of the U.S. itself is a great deterrent to
students. According to Johnson of NAFSA, “The word is out on the street
in China: You can’t get a visa to study in the United States”
(Bollag, 2004). Many students and their parents may not want to risk
money or time by taking a chance on the
United States’ system, particularly
when other nations are so accommodating.
Conclusion
When terrorists destroyed the
Twin Towers
in New York,
no one could have predicted all the ramifications of such a tragic act
of violence. Though the attack on a powerful symbol of American
hegemonic global dominance might have signaled a need for communication
among and understanding of other cultures, the Bush administration,
engulfed in an atmosphere of fear and chaos, restricted and increasingly
isolated U.S. higher education from the rest
of the world. In the shadow of these policies, will higher education
allow American hegemony to flourish? As Congress continues to struggle
with immigration issues, academia will have to fight for the continued
enrollment of international students.
Scholars and students must demand access for international
students, scholars and international research collaboration. Otherwise,
academic and intellectual freedom, as well as the potential for
counter-perspectives, may also be destroyed.
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