Not All Classrooms Have Four Walls (part 2)
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” -Andy McIntyre
"CTBTO Academic Forum, Vienna, 18-20 March" by The Official CTBTO Photostream is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Before we get started I just wanted to comment on the picture above, because I feel it is a good illustration of what it feels like to be a foreign student in America. From the moment you start the process at the Embassy in your home country all the way to the moment you defend your thesis, you are constantly on the spot. “Why do you want to study in America?” is a common question asked during the student visa interview, and for many students it is one of the most difficult to answer.
Indeed, why would anyone want to leave behind their family and friends and start over in a new place, far from home, where they are not only expected to adapt quickly but also are immediately thrust into some of the most difficult and competitive academic programs on Earth? And yet, many of them succeed wildly and go on to become some of America’s most dynamic innovators. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the commitment and determination that is needed to navigate this difficult process.
Now, let’s talk about how the U.S. immigration system treats these students. Let’s start with the big picture, in 2019 the Department of State received 488,075 F1 visa applications and refused 123,871 of those applications. That’s a refusal rate of 25.4 percent. Now let’s look at the FY 2019 DHS Entry/Exit Overstay Report:
“For nonimmigrants who entered on a student or exchange visitor visa (F, M, or J visa), the FY 2019 Suspected In-Country Overstay rate is 1.52 percent of the 1,949,166 foreign students and exchange visitors scheduled to complete their program in the United States.” (emphasis mine)
Does that look right to you? If we have that many people studying in the U.S., and that few people violating their status, what are we doing refusing so many? In every other respect the presence of these people is a boon to our country (economically, socially, and politically). Surely we are taking a very measured and logical approach to selecting who we let in and who we do not, right?
Well, no, unfortunately. This is the first problem with how the U.S. immigration system handles student visas. Many people will be shocked to hear this, but adjudication for non-immigrant visas is mostly arbitrary (for more on this see our series on tourist visas). In most cases student visa applicants are approved or denied off the back of a 2-3 minute interview conducted by a consular officer. As most university programs require the applicant to have an appropriate level of English skill, these interviews are often conducted in English (as opposed to tourist visa interviews), further compounding the stress a student experiences trying to answer rapid-fire, random questions from a skeptical official.
For student visas the system attempts to build in a little extra scrutiny via the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) which is administered by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The system requires a designated official or office at each school that accepts international students to create proof of their enrollment (via a form I-20) that they carry with them to their interview, and also provide updates on their enrollment status periodically. If the student fails to attend a program the administrator is supposed to note this in the SEVIS system, which will trigger a review of their case the next time they encounter immigration authorities or apply for a visa abroad.
Overall this system works poorly for all parties involved in the visa process. For students, it creates a process that works the opposite of how things work for domestic students: they must apply to a school, get accepted, and pay all fees associated with the application just to get the paperwork to even apply for a visa. If they make a mistake or fail to convince the consular officer they are qualified during their interview, their only option is to postpone their enrollment (remember these applications are time-sensitive and pegged to university start dates and mandatory course drop dates) or fork over another 160 dollars and hope they can get back in for another interview and get lucky on their second, third, or fourth interview (this does happen). Obviously this doesn’t create a good impression of our system from the student’s perspective.
For schools this also creates unnecessary uncertainty. As we showed in part 1, schools depend on foreign students for almost a third of their tuition income. Many spots in highly sought-after schools and programs are allotted to foreign students without any guarantee that they will be able to receive a visa. As the process of approval is more or less arbitrary, each year schools must scramble to fill hundreds if not thousands of slots for students who were unexpectedly rejected at the 11th hour for their student visa. In addition, the SEVIS program puts an undue burden on administrators to track and report on foreign student’s activities. While a domestic student can take a semester off, go study abroad, or enroll in a reduced course load per their preference, doing any of these things as an international student can land you on a SEVIS watchlist and cause problems for you at every step of the immigration process from that point.
Finally, it is just not a good system from the U.S. government’s point of view. As we demonstrated when looking at refusal vs. overstay statistics, a vast number of otherwise eligible and likely successful students are being refused due to the arbitrary criteria applied to student visa applications. In particular, an area of scrutiny that is often applied during the consular interview is a “wealth test” of sorts. The consular officer is required to evaluate the (household) financial resources of a student applicant to determine if they are likely to be able to pay the (usually) full price tuition at their institution for their chosen program. For the wealthy and connected in any given country this is a perfunctory step, but for many talented students from more modest backgrounds this is unnecessarily difficult requirement. This is an area where the responsibility would more logically be placed with the school itself, which has a vested financial interest in not accepting students who can’t pay for and complete their program. If international students weren’t paying for school then American universities wouldn’t be rushing to admit them, so putting this decision in the hands of consular officials makes little sense.
Well, fine, but what about fraud? Glad you asked. There is a real element of fraud in the student visa process, and it involves a substantial amount of money for black-market fraudulent document makers, visa-mill fake schools, and pay-to-play OPT scams. Immiwonk’s position on this shadow industry (writ large) is fairly clear: it’s a problem largely of the U.S. immigration system’s own making. Most under-the-table services in the immigration world are there not because there is anything inherently criminal about the activity involved, but rather because the system is failing to meet people’s needs. We will look at a few specifics of this next week and talk about easy fixes that can be made to pull the rug out from under a lot of brokers and fixers in this industry.
Our last point for this week also involves fraud, more specifically how the immigration system has evolved to fight it. All the major players in the immigration process have fraud detection and prevention offices. DOS has a Fraud Prevention Unit (FPU) in every consular section, USCIS has a whole sub-directorate devoted to it (FDNS), and ICE obviously works with CBP to identify students who are not using their student visas properly and conducts investigations where there appears to be large-scale fraudulent activity. The problem as it stands is that these offices are addicted to stat games and chasing after penny-ante bullshit. Thanks for letting me work in a “The Wire” quote here:
“The stat games... that lie, it’s what ruined this department. Shining up shit and calling it gold, so that Majors become Colonels and Mayors become Governors; pretending to do police work while one generation fucking trains the next how not to do the job.” - Cedric Daniels
Let’s be honest, quantifying investigative work is hard. It’s not a problem unique to immigration fraud. But like all agencies, the investigative apparatus in our immigration system runs on numbers and metrics. For that reason, they are addicted to low-hanging fruit like fake document vendors/clients, visa brokers, and student visa violators. Any production unit at a consulate or USCIS office can easily quantify their work: x cases were processed, y appointments were scheduled, z inquiries were responded to. When it comes time to ask for more money, personnel, or resources it’s a simple matter of comparing this year to last year and giving management a positive percentage year on year. But for investigative units they need “collars” to prove they are effective. In the student visa context, that’s what leads to press conferences like this sad spectacle this year by ICE. If we are going to treat foreign students like the important resource they are, we must reorient our fraud-detection apparatus to stop treating them like potential criminals and start accepting the fact that it is the system itself that is driving otherwise rule-abiding and trustworthy people into the hands of bad actors.
Alright, well we will stop here for this week. A lot of discussion is floating around about immigration this week, and the future Biden administration has started to present their agenda. Next week we will talk about where we go from here!
In the news:
It just got harder for immigrants: the U.S. naturalization test is about to change - This story got a fair amount of coverage this week, so we won’t rehash the details (the article does an excellent job there). One observation: it is surprising that most Americans don’t know that you must speak, read, and write in English to pass the U.S. citizenship exam (with limited exceptions). Making the test harder in terms of knowledge questions is one thing, but in a country where we allow people to take their driver’s license test in 31 languages it’s interesting that we still require people to learn a foreign (to them) language to even have a chance.
In Michigan, undocumented immigrants form learning pod so they won't lose their jobs - Great story here, lately we have been talking about how a lot of low-income undocumented workers have been pushed into extreme situations due to the pandemic. Really wonderful to see a community pull together and try to take care of each other. Political leadership (at every level) that facilitates this kind of activity would be a major improvement over what we are seeing now.