Living in terror's shadow: Gannett News Service special report

WASHINGTON — A rushed effort by immigration officials to better monitor foreign students — a key component of the nation’s new focus on homeland security — may take off before many of the participating schools can get on board.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service came under increased pressure to create a new system for tracking foreign students after officials learned that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers entered the country on a student visa.

Anti-terrorism legislation that President Bush signed into law in October gives the INS until Jan. 1 to create a computer database for keeping track of about 500,000 foreign students enrolled at an estimated 7,500 colleges, universities, trade schools and high schools. The INS, in turn, has told the schools they must begin sending information about the students to the database by Jan. 30.

Agency officials say the schools have time to meet the deadline. Representatives of the schools disagree.

They note that the INS still hasn’t provided larger colleges and universities — which enroll 85 percent of the foreign students — with software specifications they will need to connect to the new Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). Even if the INS releases the specifications soon, schools say, some of them will not have time to purchase, install and test the software by the Jan. 30 deadline.

“It’s going to be a very bumpy takeoff,” said Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education, which represents 1,800 colleges and universities.

After Jan. 30, schools won’t be allowed to enroll foreign students until they begin participating in SEVIS — a stiff penalty. In addition to paying tuition, the students assist colleges with teaching and research, and add to campus diversity. Foreign students and their families spend an estimated $11 billion in this country each year, according to the Association of International Educators.

Even officials at the Justice Department, the INS’ parent agency, are skeptical that schools will have enough time to meet the deadline.

“It is not likely that the INS will be able to fully implement SEVIS by January 30, 2003,” the department’s inspector general said in a May 20 report.

INS officials dismiss that possibility.

“We are confident we will be able to meet the timeline as advertised,’’ agency spokesman Chris Bentley said.

The push to improve tracking of foreign students began after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. One of the men convicted in the bombing, Eyad Ismoil of Jordan, had entered the United States on a student visa to attend Wichita State University in Kansas. After three semesters, he dropped out and joined a group of Islamic terrorists.

Congress reacted by passing a law in 1996 that required the INS to create a computerized foreign student tracking system by Jan. 1, 2003.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress set new requirements for the tracking system. The requirements were an additional hurdle for INS, which before Sept. 11 had developed a pilot tracking system and tested it on 21 colleges and universities.

One university, Duke in North Carolina, which enrolled 1,640 international students last year, liked the pilot system and officials there are optimistic SEVIS will be a success.

“It’s going to work because we’ve seen it work before,’’ said Catheryn Cotten, director of the office that handles Duke’s foreign students.

Other schools, though, say that extending the Jan. 30 deadline is crucial to launching the tracking system.

On June 14, the American Council on Education and 32 other higher education groups wrote the INS, asking that the deadline be extended to six months after the software specifications have become available and the Justice Department’s inspector general has certified SEVIS as fully operational.

Officials at the schools also have asked INS to delay releasing the specifications for a few weeks to ensure they are compatible with the latest technology the schools are using, Hartle said.

Bentley said the agency plans to release the software specifications “very soon.”

“That’s enough time for (the schools) to fully participate in the system by the mandatory date of January 30,’’ he said.

Bentley noted that agency officials met their own July 1 deadline for operating a simpler version of SEVIS for small schools. Those schools serve a limited number of foreign students and send information on one student at a time to the SEVIS database. Now, 232 of those schools are participating in the program.

But schools with much larger foreign student populations will need to send information on many students at a single time to SEVIS. They are still waiting for the software specifications.

“We’re going to have a system that’s going to house information on literally thousands of people that’s untested,’’ said Michael Brzezinski, director of the office that handles foreign students at Purdue University in Indiana. “If (the system) is not ready, should it go live just for the sake of meeting a deadline?’’

Another critic of the deadline said the INS chose the date in order to shift political pressure to make the new tracking system succeed away from the agency and onto the schools.

“There’s no way the schools can meet the deadline,’’ said Victor C. Johnson, associate executive director for public policy for the Association of International Educators, which represents foreign-student advisers. “I think it’s clear (the INS) did that for political cover for themselves.”