Vulnerable Gaps in U.S. Immigration System
The Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. has several lines of defense to thwart foreign terrorists trying to enter the country, from visa screeners to immigration inspectors to border-patrol agents.
But even the enforcers who decide which people get in, and for how long, see big gaps in every layer that could leave the U.S. vulnerable.
This nation of immigrants long has struggled to balance an open-door tradition with forces demanding limits. Historically, the debate has turned on economic questions: Do immigrants depress Americans' wages and drain social services, or do they revitalize the economy with fresh skills and hard work?
Since Sept. 11, though, immigration is discussed almost solely in terms of national security. And yet, as James Ziglar, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, recently told Congress, "The structure of the organization and the management systems that we have in place are outdated and, in many respects, inadequate for the challenges we face."
Congress is weighing a range of new border measures: beefing up security on the vast, mostly unprotected Canadian border; reviving systems to track foreign visitors; and increasing funding to improve coordination between law enforcement and the State Department, among other things. Meanwhile, the BCIS, the State Department and the Customs Service are heightening their enforcement efforts.
All quarters have their work cut out for them. The General Accounting Office, Congress's research arm, reported earlier this year that despite some improvements, the visa system run by the State Department "remains a significant challenge" for the U.S. because of problems with insufficient and inexperienced staff and visa fraud. The weaknesses could help explain how the suspected terrorists got in, or stayed, illegally.
Investigators still are piecing together the visa status of the 19 dead hijacking suspects, but at least six obtained visas at the U.S. consulate in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, before making their way to Hong Kong, Paris, London or Zurich and catching flights to the U.S. While information suggests nine were in the U.S. legally, at least three were in illegally or had overstayed their visas, and there was either no documentation, or incomplete documentation, for the remaining seven.
Immigration lawyers say they have heard scattered reports that U.S. overseas offices are giving additional scrutiny to visa applications, but they don't see an across-the-board crackdown on awarding visas. The State Department says no new procedures have been put into place since Sept. 11 that would result in more applications being denied.
Just the routine of screening U.S. arrivals is a massive task. At about 300 air, land and sea ports of entry, the USCIS inspects more than 300 million noncitizens a year; some travel on visas, but the majority are allowed in without them, such as people who live along the relaxed Canadian border.
The real challenges start overseas. A U.S. visa is a sought-after piece of identification, desired by refugees, businessmen, students -- and criminals of all stripes. In fiscal-year 2000, the State Department processed 9.6 million nonimmigrant-visa applications, which are required for temporary visits. But anyone trying to sneak through can start by forging documents in a foreign country, and presenting those to often overtaxed U.S. visa officials in overseas embassies.
"There's real pressure on these folks to process the visas at the same time they're trying to protect our borders," says Jess Ford, a GAO immigration specialist.
The State Department's inspector general cited similar problems in 1997. One visa-processing post that handled 100,000 applications a year, including many from countries where fraud and drug trafficking are common, had only $300 in its travel budget for policing fraud -- "which was not adequate," the report noted. Investigations mostly were done by phone.
Some fixes have been made over the years, such as mandating appointment-only systems to reduce long lines and their resultant pressure on officers to rush people through. Border inspectors also have some new technological tools, including devices that enable them to spot certain kinds of crude forgeries, and "photo phones" to connect border outposts with a national document laboratory.
Even so, says Jim Hesse, chief intelligence officer at the BCIS's Forensic Document Laboratory in Northern Virginia, "There are some really good counterfeiters out there," despite innovations that inhibit fakers, such as holograms.
But forgery attempts appear to be increasing. In fiscal 1999, Mr. Hesse's unit sent out 50 bulletins on scams it had spotted. In fiscal 2001, there were 84 bulletins. Calls to his lab from border inspectors more than doubled to 3,531 in fiscal 2001, which ended Sept. 30, from 1,401 in fiscal 1999.
Government officials say another problem is the responsible agencies' failure to share information on suspected terrorists, sometimes to protect sources and sensitive information. Even if a visa applicant is on the government's suspect list, slipping through the cracks can occur in ways both simple and sophisticated.
One low-tech ruse is to apply for a visa in another person's name, using forged passports and other home-country documents, laminating personal photos onto those papers much as U.S. teenagers make fake I.D.s to buy alcohol.
Law-enforcement officials cite the case of Nageeb Abdul Jabar Mohamed Al-Hadi, now being held in Toronto. He was arrested there on Sept. 11 after his flight to Chicago from Frankfurt, Germany, was forced to land. Officials say he had three Yemeni passports, each with his picture, but with different names and dates of birth.
Some visitors who wouldn't otherwise qualify for a U.S. visa can get into the country in other ways. One program, for example, awards visas to people who come to work for religious organizations with U.S. operations. The GAO told Congress in 2000 that petition reviewers at the USCIS and State Department sometimes relied on little more than a letter from a sponsoring
organization to approve a religious visa. An USCIS investigation found a pastor who filed immigrant-visa petitions for 900 people, and falsified the number of years they had been members of the church; a church in Fiji filed petitions for 30 people already in the U.S. on expired visas.
The USCIS proposed antifraud changes to the program in 1995, but said earlier this month that new rules weren't yet in force.
Tourist visas also are vulnerable to fraud. Earlier this year, the State Department's inspector general reported to Congress that a Colorado junior-high-school principal repeatedly had written to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, supporting visas for Russians he said would participate in educational activities he arranged in this country. U.S. Embassy officials based their approvals "largely on the letters," the State Department said. The man admitted to providing false information for 47 visas and getting $88,000 in return, according to his plea bargain. It isn't known how many of the Russians came to the U.S., or where they are now.
Overstaying a visa is relatively simple. While the nation has focused for years on illegal aliens slipping across the Mexican border, the USCIS testified in 1999 that as many as half the illegal population is made up of "overstays" who arrived legally. The number of people overstaying their visas is estimated at two million, and is growing by 125,000 a year.
A Palestinian who overstayed his visitor's visa was arrested in 1997 for allegedly planning to bomb a subway in Brooklyn. The Justice Department's inspector general found the Palestinian was granted entry to the U.S. solely to catch a connecting flight to Ecuador. Investigators found that neither the immigration inspector at the man's port of entry, nor the State Department officer who issued a visa, felt responsible for verifying that the man had a ticket to Ecuador.
National Security Trumps Illegal-alien Amnesty
By Edward Hegstrom
The Houston Chronicle
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/page1/1083218
Mexican President Vicente Fox, the man who once advocated open borders, came to Washington recently to assure Americans that border security is now his priority numero uno.
Like most people in Washington, Fox seems to recognize that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 brought a sudden and dramatic shift in the way this country looks at the politics of immigration.
The amnesty for illegal immigrants for which Fox lobbied at the Capitol just a month ago now appears on hold, maybe even dead. And that's only the beginning.
After moving toward extending more rights and benefits to immigrants, Congress and local leaders now seem set to reverse the trend. Beyond closing the border, they talk of taking away driver's licenses, restricting access to education and even using local police to help track down visa violators -- all areas where liberals have won recent important victories.
The immigrant-rights movement ground to a halt after it was revealed that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were foreigners in the country illegally.
"There has been just a tectonic shift in thinking," said Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a proponent of tighter borders who heads the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus.
Tancredo plans to introduce legislation calling for beefing up the Border Patrol, monitoring foreign students and stiffening the controls over those leaving the country. He also wants to temporarily close the country to most foreigners by implementing a six-month moratorium on new visas.
His package will face competition. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has proposed stiffening the regulation of foreign students, while even Democratic Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee and Gene Green of Houston have proposed legislation to improve accountability in the immigration visa process. Some of this concerns pro-immigration leaders, who worry that the rush to close the borders may do little to stop terrorism and could hurt the economy.
"A lot of these proposals don't make sense," said Charles Foster, a local immigration lawyer. While Foster said he recognizes immigration needs some increased controls, he argues that the more important problems lie elsewhere. "The real problem is not with immigration, it's with intelligence."
Still, the public seems inclined to clamp down. A Zogby International poll after the attacks found that 77 percent of likely voters across the country think the government is not doing enough to control the borders.
"Life is going to get a little more difficult for immigrants," predicted Steven Camarota with the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., group in favor of restrictions. Camarota said the attacks, combined with rising unemployment, will erode public sympathy toward immigrants in the country illegally.
Those who favor an amnesty that would legalize illegal immigrants admit the timing of the attack could not have been worse.
"We were just getting a lot of momentum," said Eliseo Medina, of the Service Employees International Union in Los Angeles, who is organizing a campaign in favor of legalizing undocumented immigrants. "But we're still going forward."
Medina said his campaign will succeed because Americans can distinguish between hard-working immigrants and those who come here to cause harm. Legalizing them would make it easier to keep track of them.
"Here we have a whole group of workers who are saying, `Bring us out of the shadows. Identify us,' " he said.
Other immigrant-rights issues that appear in jeopardy include:
* Driver's licenses. Some states have passed laws in recent months making it easier for undocumented immigrants to get driver's licenses. The Texas Legislature approved such a law earlier this year, but Gov. Rick Perry vetoed it.
Now that word has leaked out that some of the alleged hijackers got driver's licenses in Florida, some want to make it more difficult for immigrants to get state identifications. In California, Gov. Gray Davis vetoed a driver's license bill last week.
Some want a national identification system. A recent Harris Poll found that 68 percent of Americans support the creation of a national ID system.
Experts say such a system would make it easier to identify -- and deport -- illegal immigrants.
* Local policing. Most big city police departments have policies forbidding officers from checking the immigration status of people they stop on the idea that if the police help deport people, then immigrants might not call when they are the victims of crime.
The Houston Police Department has one of the most restrictive policies around. Officers in some cities will at least call the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service when they have a criminal in jail; HPD officers won't call even then.
But after Sept. 11, some officers say there is increased resentment of the longstanding HPD policy.
"We're sworn to uphold the law, but our code tells us to look the other way with illegal aliens," said Sgt. Doug Phipps of HPD, who emphasized that he spoke only for himself.
Tancredo's bill calls for facilitating improved relations between local police and the BCIS.
* Exit visas. As part of a broad 1996 immigration law, Congress decided to set up a system to better check immigrants when they enter or leave the country. Currently, the government does not really know when tourists or other visa holders depart, making it impossible to find out how many of them have stayed on. About half the illegal immigrants in the country originally arrived here legally and then stayed on after their visas expired.
The provision was never implemented, because business leaders complained it would clog the northern and southern borders.
But most of the alleged hijackers are believed to have overstayed their visas, which has made some in Congress say it is time to revisit the plan.
* Border militarization. The military was increasing patrols along the Mexican border until a Marine shot and killed an 18-year-old goatherder in West Texas. The 1997 shooting did not end the military presence at the border, but experts say it did prevent an escalation of troop movements.
But after Sept. 11, there are calls for increasing the troop presence along the Rio Grande.
Attacks Open Eyes to Weaknesses in Visa-waiver Program
By Jo Craven McGinty
Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/ny-epwaive072405155oct09.story
Government officials were warned more than two years ago that terrorists, criminals and alien smugglers regularly slip into the United States by exploiting a program intended to encourage foreign tourism. The program allows citizens from 29 "low-risk" countries to enter the United States without a visa, but after last month's terrorist attacks, some legislators want to reassess this streamlined program.
"There has been another rude awakening around Congress that the shortcuts we have permitted to allow people to come here either on business or tourism have been exploited by terrorists," Rep. Anthony D. Weiner (D-Brooklyn) told Newsday. "The $64,000 question is if Sept. 11 finally means that programs like the visa waiver program are going to get tightened up."
In 1999, about half of all foreign visitors to the United States - close to 17 million people - were from visa waiver countries.
The program bypasses the visa process, which is intended to minimize threats to national security by screening foreign visitors before they enter the United States. Obtaining a visa requires a written application to a U.S. consulate abroad and may include interviews and background checks by the U.S. Department of State. In contrast, visa waiver visitors fill out a form, usually while en route to the United States by airplane. Once they arrive at a port of entry, they spend about a minute with an inspector from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
This lack of scrutiny has created a black market for stolen or fake passports from visa waiver countries. The abusers include a terrorist convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Despite this and a 1999 inspector general's report that said abuses of the program threaten national security, Congress voted last year to make the 12-year-old pilot program permanent.
"We were operating within the framework of the time," said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). "The various fractures in the program were not considered so overwhelming that they couldn't be fixed with pending legislation.
"We will not, however, sacrifice the nation's security by continuing a program that doesn't work," said Jackson Lee, ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims. "We need to have quick hearings on whether the program should be eliminated, downsized or further restricted."
The FBI and the State Department have refused to say whether any of the suspected hijackers in the September attacks exploited the visa waiver program to get into the country; however, one terrorist cell linked to the attacks was based in Germany. And six suspects believed connected to the attacks were arrested in Spain, where they were manufacturing passports, according to The Washington Post. Both countries participate in the visa waiver program.
"Whether they did or not, it's clearly a weak link in our border security chain," Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said.
The visa waiver program was implemented in 1988. Almost immediately, it was exploited by criminals, who appreciated the ease with which they could enter the United States. Seventeen months after Britain signed on as the first participating country, a 1999 inspector general's report said, Nigerian drug couriers used altered British passports to infiltrate the United States.
The report concluded: "Abuse of the [visa waiver program] poses a threat to U.S. national security and increases illegal immigration."
Four years into the program, Ahmad Mohammad Ajaj, who would subsequently be convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, entered the United States using a Swedish passport with his photograph substituted for the original.
The program's simplicity invites fraud, but its flaws make it even more susceptible. Among the problems:
USCIS inspectors are supposed to check passports against a "lookout" system to detect stolen or fraudulent documents or people who are barred from entering the country. If a passport is machine readable, it is scanned. If it isn't - and many are not - its number must be manually entered.
The inspector general found that USCIS inspectors, compelled by a congressional mandate to process foreign visitors within 45 minutes, do not check every passport.
"USCIS inspectors told the OIG [Office of the Inspector General] that they manually enter passport numbers only if they are suspicious of an applicant," the inspector general's report said.
Since 1999, the USCIS has adjusted its official policy to require manual entry of all non-machine readable passport numbers; however, an USCIS employee suggested the policy revision has had little effect: "The time issue does come into play."
Even if all passports were checked, the lookout system is faulty, the inspector general's report said. In a sample test of 1,067 blank passports reported stolen to the BCIS, more than half did not have a lookout record because of tardy or erroneous data entry. About 100,000 blank passports have been stolen from program countries.
Despite the problems, domestic support for the program is twofold: Participating countries reciprocate by allowing U.S. citizens equally swift entry. And the program funnels billions of tourist dollars into the U.S. economy. In 1999, visa waiver visitors spent an estimated $91 billion here.
Advocates point out that scrapping the program could cost the U.S. tourism dollars plus the expense of reinstating visa procedures in the participating countries.
"Not only would business and tourism suffer, but the cost of reallocating the State Department personnel and resources to visa waiver countries would be very high," Mary A. Ryan, assistant secretary for consular affairs for the State Department, told the House subcommittee on immigration last year. The cost to the U.S. government to re-establish operations in waiver
countries would exceed $130 million, Ryan said.
Foreign Students May Bear Brunt of Terrorism with Stricter Visas
By John Woolfolk
The San Jose Mercury News
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/nation/docs/visas28.htm
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- As this month's terrorist attacks renew calls for a crackdown on student visas, colleges fear new proposals will discourage applicants and threaten a $12.3 billion international education business.
Educators agree student visas need better oversight. But they say proposals to suspend or delay new visas would drive away international students that many colleges depend on for revenue while doing little to keep out terrorists. "It's very myopic and it isn't really going to solve the problem," said George Beers, who handles foreign student recruitment at Foothill and DeAnza community colleges. "There are so many other ways people can get into the United States."
The revelation that one of the 19 alleged hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attack entered the United States on a student visa prompted Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to call for a six-month moratorium on new student visas.
Feinstein's proposed bill would provide $32.3 million for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to track foreign students.
Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., is calling for a 30-day waiting period for all visa applicants and tamper-proof documentation.
"We have lost control of our borders, and it's clear the public very much wants this to change," said Steven Camarota, of the Center for Immigration Studies. The group, which favors tighter border controls, commissioned a post-attack poll showing support for a crackdown.
But turning such sentiment into effective policy has proved vexing for a country committed to global commerce and sharing porous borders totaling nearly 2,000 miles along Mexico and 5,500 miles with Canada.
Congress toughened immigration laws in 1996 after the first World Trade Center bombing three years earlier, in which one of the suspects was living in the country on an expired student visa.
A provision for a computerized system to track foreign students was opposed by colleges and stalled in disputes over funding.
The Association of International Educators dropped its opposition in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, but remains concerned about the system's fairness and effectiveness.
The half-million foreign students entering the United States are just a fraction of the 30 million non-immigrants granted visas each year. The vast majority, more than 23 million, enter on tourist visas, according to BCIS. In California, there are 100,000 foreign students enter out of 4.2 million non-immigrant visas.
There are an estimated 6 million foreigners living in the United States on expired visas of various sorts, 2.5 million of them in California, said USCIS spokeswoman Sharon Rummery.
Two other suspects in the Sept. 11 hijackings entered on tourist visas.
"You can abuse any sort of visa," Rummery said.
Most foreign students come from China, Japan and India. But students aren't excluded from nations considered havens for anti-U.S. terrorists. Last year, there were 112 from Iraq and 110 from Afghanistan.
Colleges court foreign students because they pay higher tuition, create demand for high-level courses and foster a cosmopolitan environment.
California's 66,000 foreign students, more than any other state, contribute an estimated $1.6 billion to the economy. A moratorium could devastate many colleges.
Tuition from the nearly 2,000 foreign students at Foothill and DeAnza colleges accounts for 10 percent of the schools' budgets, Beers said.
"That $10 million revenue is hundreds of jobs," Beers said. "Even a six-month moratorium would significantly reduce the number of those students for several years."
It's unclear how a crackdown would affect Stanford University, where there are 3,200 international students, 19 percent of the entire student population, said John Pearson, director of the Bechtel International Center.
Most of Stanford's international students have already arrived. Problems would arise if the moratorium starts next spring, when most students submit their immigration paperwork.
Stanford's foreign students said cumbersome background checks would discourage many from coming.
"If they really want to treat immigrants like that, they will lose the best students," said Lekan Owodunni, a Nigerian graduate student studying aeronautics and astronautics.
National ID Card Push Roils Privacy Advocates
By Brian Krebs
Newsbytes
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170488.html
In 1986, while the government of Australia was drafting legislation requiring citizens to carry a national identification card, civil liberties advocates formed Privacy International, a group dedicated to sharing information on similar movements around the globe.
The Australian government later dropped the plan after citizens literally rioted in the streets in protest.
But in the wake of terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, talk of a national ID system among lawmakers in the United States, U.K., and Australia is once again putting privacy groups on the defensive.
"This issue is like a bad case of herpes," said David Banisar, deputy director for the global privacy group. "No matter how many times you try to treat it, it just keeps coming back."
Over the past two weeks, a number of House and Senate lawmakers have begun toying with the idea of a national identification card, or adding a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint to all Social Security cards.
Banisar said the calls for a national ID card in response to the recent attacks are misplaced, noting that nearly all of the terrorists who directly participated in the attacks were in the United States legally. Banisar added that the primary targets of such a system would almost certainly be Latin American immigrants.
"The reality is that ID cards will do very little to stop this sort of stuff, but it will make it much easier to track everybody else for any number of purposes," he said. "In the end, this would simply give legal justification for all kinds of profiling that we've seen so many bad examples of in the past few years."
In fact, the most vocal proponents of a national ID card system have traditionally been lawmakers in the U.S-Mexico border states and those in charge of immigration committees in Congress.
Rep. George Gekas, R-Pa., who heads the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, recently said Congress could no longer reject the idea of national ID card for citizens.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, long a proponent of stricter immigration laws, has said he would like to explore requiring Social Security cards and certain immigration documents to have biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints. Aides to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., also have said the senator would be interested in a national ID program.
The last time Congress attempted a similar move was with the Illegal Immigration Act of 1996, which among other things would have required states to list Social Security numbers on all driver's licenses. That section of the Act was later repealed.
Lori Cole, executive director of the conservative Eagle Forum, said while the national ID proposals being discussed of late are far more high-tech in nature, the overall concept remains the same.
"We believe that bad ideas before are still bad ideas," Cole said. There have been no recent concrete proposals to institute a national ID program, and aides to both Gekas and Smith say their bosses have made no indications that they plan to introduce such measures any time soon.
Yet, the debate has already shifted to the private sector. During an interview on San Francisco's KPIX-TV last Friday, Oracle Corp. Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison offered to pony up the software needed to create a national ID system.
"We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and embedded in the ID card," Ellison told the television station.
U.S. residents' identification and fingerprints would be stored in a database to check against ID cards presented at airports to tighten security in hopes of stopping terrorist attacks.
Banisar said given the company's history and the huge profits to be made, he wasn't surprised to hear Oracle calling for a national ID system. Oracle, the world's largest database management systems company, grew out of a contract with the CIA.
"Sure they'll give away the software, but who's going to maintain all the databases needed for such a project?" Banisar asked. "The important point isn't the ID card itself, but what databases are going to have to be combined and (made) compatible to support it. Oracle would be right there selling support to every subsidiary database that hooks in."
Ari Schwartz, a policy analyst for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said a national ID program could be done in a privacy-friendly way as long as the goal is to allow individuals to be in control of the information held about them.
Yet, maintaining a central database containing personal information on every American could have grave "unintended consequences," Schwartz said.
"There are some measures that we should definitely be moving forward on today, and then there are some other ideas that we need to have a longer-term discussion about," he said. "This is definitely one of those longer-term ideas."
More Foreign Student Scrutiny Likely
By Ben Fox
The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010920/aponline113831_000.htm
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- A government effort to create a database of the nearly 600,000 foreign students at U.S. colleges and universities is expected to gain momentum as a result of the terrorist attacks.
Authorities began compiling such a database in response to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. But the program languished amid political opposition and remains only a pilot project involving 25 schools in the Southeast.
The FBI has said some suspects and material witnesses in last week's attacks entered the country on student visas, a disclosure that is likely to undercut opposition to the project and prompt renewed efforts to develop a complete database, immigration experts and U.S. officials said.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service has said that it needs a central database, because as things stand now, the agency does not know when a foreign student has dropped out or moved.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who sponsored the original bill to create the database, said he and others will renew efforts to complete the project, along with enacting other curbs on immigration.
``We have to pass laws that will make it easier to find, apprehend and punish suspected terrorists,'' said Smith, a member and former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims.
Already, one effort to scrap the program has stopped, at least temporarily.
Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., wrote a bill in August to repeal authorization for the program, arguing that it was too burdensome for schools. Because of the attacks, she will not push the bill, said her chief of staff, Bill Harper.
About 570,000 foreign students are in the United States, according to the American Council on Education. China, with 55,000 students, supplies the most, followed by Japan and India. The foreign student population also includes 20 from Afghanistan and 50 from Iraq. New York University has 4,900 foreign students, more than any other U.S. institution.
Foreign students apply to U.S. schools from their home countries, then go to the nearest U.S. consulate or embassy to apply for a visa. The State Department decides whether a visa should be issued. Some academic programs are restricted. Students from North Korea, for example, are barred from taking courses in nuclear physics.
The database program, which is supposed to be fully operational by 2003, would require schools to report any change in a foreign student's status, such as enrollment, change of major or a move to a new address.
Such a database might have alerted authorities to Hani Hanjour, one of the hijackers of the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon. He entered the country last year with the stated intention of studying English at Holy Names College in Oakland, but never enrolled. Education and USCIS officials have been meeting since the plan was authorized by Congress in 1996 to work out the details. At one point, the USCIS planned to require foreign students to carry a tamper proof card, but Clinton administration officials rejected that as too intrusive.
The database idea has drawn opposition from U.S. educators who say that collecting and supplying the information would be too much work. They also question the value of the information in stopping terrorists.
In addition, some educators believe the $95 nonrefundable fee for student applicants and the message sent by the project could discourage foreigners from studying in the United States.
The American Council on Education is among those organizations that oppose elements of the project.
``I think the lesson from last week isn't that we should withdraw from the world. I think the lesson is we should engage with the world,'' said Terry Hartle, senior vice president.
USCIS Unable to Track Millions Inside U.S.
No computer system, so those who overstay visas can easily vanish
By Mike Adams
The Baltimore Sun
In an age when financial institutions can track billions of dollars down to the penny, U.S. immigration officials lack a centralized computer system to track people who overstay their visas.
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have focused attention on the Immigration and Naturalization Service's capacity to track and monitor millions of visa holders.
Meanwhile, reports that some of the hijackers might have used stolen identities has led the head of an immigration watchdog group to call for computerized visa files that include a digital thumbprint.
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, also favors reviving the practice of requiring all permanent residents who are not yet citizens to register with the government. The practice was discontinued in the 1980s, he said.
At least 16 of the 19 hijackers entered the nation legally, and like the vast majority of visa holders, they simply melted into society and beyond the scope of the BCIS.
A look at three of the hijackers shows the ease with which they obtained visas from the State Department and moved about the nation without drawing the attention of USCIS and other authorities:
--A man identified as Hani Hanjour obtained a student visa to take English lessons in California. But he never showed up for classes and helped to hijack the plane that dove into the Pentagon. He lived in Phoenix, Ariz., and San Diego before he showed up in Maryland in August and tried to rent a small plane.
--Another hijacker who took part in the Pentagon crash, Khalid Al-Midhar, took flying lessons in California. He had two visas a valid business visa and an expired tourist visa.
--Marwan Al-Shehhi had a tourist visa when he and other hijackers crashed a plane into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
The terrorist attacks, which included the downing of an airliner in Shanksville, Pa., killed more than 5,000 people and triggered the largest criminal investigation in the nation's history.
At least 75 people believed to have ties to the terrorists are being detained indefinitely by federal authorities on alleged immigration violations.
An USCIS official close to the investigation said some of the detainees had stayed in the country after their visas expired and others had obtained unauthorized jobs.
One of the suspects, Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested Aug. 17 in Minnesota after he tried to buy time on a flight simulator for jetliners at a Minnesota flight school, law enforcement officials said.
Moussaoui obtained a visa to attend a flight school in Norman, Okla. Moussaoui applied for his visa in London. He accumulated only about 56.9 hours of flight time before he dropped out of the program because of poor flying skills.
Dale Davis, the director of op erations at Airman Flight School in Oklahoma, said Moussaoui contacted the school by e-mail last September and inquired about lessons.
Davis said the school sent Moussaoui an I-20 immigration form so he could apply for an M-1 visa that's issued to students at vocational schools.
Moussaoui paid a total of $5,000, half by check and the other half in cash, Davis said, adding that Moussaoui did not fly well enough to solo, something most students accomplish in less than 40 hours.
"I talked to him about two weeks before he left," Davis said. "I told him he wasn't progressing, and he said he'd think about it."
Davis said Moussaoui spent a couple of nights in housing the school provides for students, then he got an apartment. Davis said Moussaoui had a car; he couldn't remember the make, but said, "It wasn't fancy."
Investigators have traced several of the hijackers to flight schools across the country. Al- Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi, another hijacker aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, took flying lessons at Sorbi's Flying Club in San Diego, they said.
Hanjour obtained a student visa to study English at a Berlitz ELS Language Center in Oakland, Calif. But "he never showed up, we never saw him," said Michael Palm, a Berlitz spokesman.
The FBI reported that Hanjour lived in Phoenix and San Diego before he turned up at Freeway Airport, near Bowie in August, about a month before the Pentagon crash.
Marcel Bernard, chief flight instructor at Freeway, said Hanjour had a valid pilot's license and a medical certificate, but he was turned down after he failed three flight tests.
Bernard said Hanjour's English was "functional" but his flying skills were "poor." He said Hanjour failed tests given by instructors who took him on a route over the Chesapeake Bay, east of Washington's airspace. Bernard said although Hanjour had a pilot's license, his flying did not show that he was well trained. After he failed the third test, he was "turned away," Bernard said.
In recent years, the number of visas issued has been growing.
In 1981, the State Department issued about 11.8 million visas. By 1998, the latest year statistics were available, the figure had risen to about 30 million -- about 28 million of them temporary visas for travel, business and medical treatment.
In addition, travelers with valid passports from 29 countries can visit the United States for 90 days or less without a visa as part of the visa waiver program.
David Simcox, a retired State Department official, said countries with low overstay rates can qualify for the program. But he pointed out that it's virtually impossible for U.S. immigration officials to monitor the participating nations because it does not have a reliable system for monitoring those who stay past the expiration date of their visas.
Simcox, whose 30-year career included working as a passport officer, said stolen or forged passports from countries on the visa waiver program are coveted in the underworld. He said they are a valuable commodity because they guarantee easy access to the United States. He said the program should be reviewed as part of the counter-terrorism effort.
The USCIS did not respond to a request for figures showing how many people remained in the country after their visas expired.
Currently, the USCIS requires visa holders to fill out forms when they arrive in the country saying where they'll be living. They're also supposed to file forms when they leave, and without the forms, the USCIS has no record of their departure, Krikorian said.
People who remain in the country after their visas expire are unlikely to come to the attention of immigration officials unless they run afoul of the law by committing serious crimes, Krikorian said, adding:
"The fact that these people become illegal immigrants is not something that would ordinarily come to the attention of the USCIS because it's relying on 13th-century technology -- paper and pen. There's no reason why this information should not be computerized, the USCIS should know in real time who has not left the country and when they should have."
Krikorian said efforts to strengthen border controls have been thwarted over the years. He pointed out that in 1996 Congress directed the USCIS to record arrivals and departures of foreigners at border crossings to identify people overstaying visas.
But protests from business interests and the Canadian government prompted Congress to postpone the requirement several times and ultimately to eliminate it. Opponents of the requirement were concerned that it would hurt tourism by increasing the time and decreasing the convenience of crossing the border.
Daniel T. Griswold, the associate director of the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank in Washington, is concerned about the political backlash of the recent terrorist attack. It will "embolden" the long- time critics of the nation's immigration policy and could result in repressive laws that will hurt the U.S. economy, he said.
The Cato Institute is a strong proponent of an open border policy. While conceding that recent attacks underscore a weakness in the process for screening and tracking visa holders, Griswold maintains that high immigration and stringent screening are not conflicting ideas.
"This is not a problem of letting too many people in; it's letting the wrong people in and failing to catch them," he said.
Tech-visa Holders Who've Lost Jobs Getting USCIS Leeway
By Crayton Harrison
The Dallas Morning News
RICHARDSON, Texas -- Technically, foreign workers who have lost their jobs in technology industry cutbacks should leave the United States. Realistically, they may not have to.
A web of laws, regulations and enforcement practices by the U.S. government has complicated the situation for workers who entered the country on a visa called H-1B that was designed for specialized workers.
Some are choosing to stay, even though they have no legal status in the country. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service is in no hurry to force them out.
``We're trying to be as understanding as possible,'' said USCIS spokesman Bill Strassberger.
The USCIS is working on regulations to address the problem of H-1B holders who have lost their jobs. Those won't be ready until at least the end of August, Strassberger said, but in June the USCIS issued a memo to regional directors explaining interim guidelines on some issues.
In that memo, the USCIS said a worker who has lost an H-1B visa can apply for one with a new company within 60 days of the termination date, with some conditions. Applying for a visa does not guarantee that one will be issued, but thanks to another law Congress passed last year, H-1B visa applicants can begin work even before the USCIS has completed the application process.
Immigration lawyers cautioned that the 60-day period in the memo is just a guideline and that no official rule has been set. But it does give some indication that the USCIS is willing to allow affected H-1B holders some leeway, attorneys said.
Even 60 days can be a short window to find a job when the economy is slow and competition is fierce.
Last year, responding to technology companies' demand for workers in the then-vigorous economy, Congress raised the limit on the number of H-1B visas that could be issued in 2001 to 195,000. Against that cap, about 132,000 visas have been processed this year, and 40,000 are pending, Strassberger said. That means companies are still bringing of foreign technology workers. Meanwhile, job cuts are funneling potentially thousands of H-1B holders back into the job market.
An Indian worker who lost his job and H-1B at a small Dallas technology firm said he's running out of options in his job search.
``The job market is very slow,'' said the man, who asked that his name not be printed because of his legal status in the country. ``I was looking into things even before the job ended, and the response time's so slow.''
One Mexican worker, a former Web designer at a Dallas communications company who lost his H-1B when his job was cut, said he has decided to stay in the country and look everywhere he can for work. But the worker, who also asked that his name not be printed, said he's worried about how his status will be affected.
``If I do the wrong thing now, I could screw everything up,'' he said. ``And nobody really knows what to do. I called the people at the USCIS three different times, and each time they told me something different.''
Once the sponsor of an H-1B visa holder terminates the job, the foreign worker officially loses legal status. But while the USCIS works on official relief for workers once welcomed into the country, it isn't likely to press the status issue, legal experts say.
Thanks to their skills, H-1B candidates are landing jobs.
An Afghan-American Speaks:
"When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler."
By Mir Tamim Ansary
Source: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/14/afghanistan/index.html
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on San Francisco's KGO Talk Radio, conceded today that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived in the United States for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing. I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."
It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats' nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is: they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide.
Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban -- by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people.
Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: That's bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this.
Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose; that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view.
He's probably wrong -- in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean -- but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that?
Bin Laden does.
Anyone else?
Muslim Groups Decry Attacks
By Larry Witham
The Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010912-71647269.htm
Ten major U.S. Muslim organizations issued statements yesterday condemning the sneak air attacks against the Pentagon and New York's twin World Trade Center towers that injured and killed perhaps thousands of Americans.
"There is no cause that justifies this type of immoral and inhumane act," said officials of the American Muslim Council (AMC). They called for "swift apprehension and punishment of the perpetrators."
Leaders of the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council said the attacks were "vicious and cowardly acts of terrorism."
"No political cause could ever be assisted by such immoral acts," they said.
"This is not 10 or 20 years ago, when Americans were surprised by the Iranian revolution," said Sayyid M. Syeed, secretary-general of the Islamic Society of North America. "People are very familiar with their Muslim neighbors."
He said Muslims were immediately blamed for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, when the culprit was actually Timothy McVeigh. "This is not turning out to be like 1995, because the press has matured," he said.
Yet such gigantic acts of terrorism as those in New York and Washington can't help but revive images or stereotypes from the past, said John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.
"Things have gotten better for American Muslims, but this will have an unfortunate fallout," he said. "They are in a tough spot."
The nation's 5 million Muslims are mostly immigrants or children of immigrants. Consequently, they frequently are associated with political turmoil or struggles for human rights abroad, Mr. Syeed said. "As Americans, we support the rights of our people, but it does not mean we endorse" one political solution or another.
Muslim leaders also said they repeatedly condemn terrorism and often distance themselves specifically from the more extreme political groups -- though not all the time.
Members of the AMC have endorsed Hamas, a political wing of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They protested the criminal proceedings against the Egyptian cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahma, when he was given a life sentence for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Mr. Esposito said that if Muslims now distance themselves from any particular radical group, they will make Islam look complicit when nobody yet knows who masterminded the terrorism.
"That would be premature and play into the idea" of Muslim guilt, he said.
If a terrorist who espouses Islam is identified, he said, "I expect major Muslim leaders will jump out front" to condemn that group.
Mr. Esposito said Americans must distinguish "legitimate resistance" movements that involve Muslims abroad from terrorist organizations.
The AMC, meanwhile, said yesterday it "supports all efforts of the investigation in order to track down the people responsible."
Tough U.S. Visa Policy Angers Chinese Scholars
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/10/international/asia/10VISA.html
BEIJING -- Yu Jie had surmounted so many obstacles en route to attending business school in the United States. Born in a small coastal city, he accumulated a degree in international finance and a decade of prestigious work experience, as a business consultant and later as a journalist.
He learned English and got high marks on the proficiency exam as well as on the standardized test for graduate school. He got family members to lend him tuition and was accepted by Purdue University, his first choice, in February.
But as Purdue begins classes, Mr. Yu remains here - having crashed into a final barrier: the American Embassy repeatedly refused to grant him a visa, saying officials believed that he really wanted to get to the United States and stay there.
"They only talked to me for a few minutes," said Mr. Yu, a gregarious, clean-cut 29-year-old, from the offices of the influential policy journal where he remains a top editor. "I think there's no way to judge, especially in such a short time. It seems like a snap decision."
In a year in which record numbers of Chinese have applied for visas - and been rejected - the American Embassy visa section here has suddenly become a focal point of anti- American resentment, its decisions derided as arbitrary and unfair.
Chinese newspapers have been running editorials and multipart series criticizing its performance.
Internet chat rooms devoted to the visa section are filled with students' battle tales and analysis of the personality and foibles of each visa officer. "The inscrutable beings behind the glass are rejecting an unprecedented number of applicants, with full or nearly full scholarships," read one article in a series currently running in the popular Beijing Youth Daily, one of many Chinese publications to report the issue.
From the Chinese perspective, the issue is simple: on the basis of interviews lasting less than five minutes, thousands of Chinese this year have found their longstanding plans for study, travel or work jettisoned. Those denied visas include students with full scholarships to Ivy League schools and grandparents wanting to see a first grandchild.
While such cases are not unique to China, the numbers here have become huge and the aftermath especially far-reaching. There now are more students at American universities from China than from any other country, more than 50,000 last year, and a number of universities have complained that they are being denied valued students and teaching assistants.
More important, those denials disproportionately affect young, highly educated students and professionals, seeding resentment in a group that has played an important role in improving ties between the countries.
But American Embassy officials are inclined to be suspicious: historically, a majority of Chinese students have indeed remained in the United States after graduation, although most did so legally, and the Chinese government says that the number returning home is now growing by more than 10 percent a year.
Large numbers of Chinese have faced rejections this year, embassy officials acknowledge, and the rejection rate has been high compared with last year. But they deny that the proportion of applications turned down is an all time high - although they refused to release statistics for fear they would be "misleading."
The embassy only tallies the percentage of applications that are successful and, since many Chinese apply several times before succeeding or giving up, it is hard to know how many individuals are turned down.
However, the United States government did release figures for the six weeks between May 15 and June 20, which showed that 41 percent of student applications were rejected during that time, up from 27 percent over the same period a year earlier.
The statistics also showed that just over half of applications from research scholars and professionals were rejected, up from 38 percent in 2000, although Chinese note that the odds seem to have become somewhat better recently.
An American diplomat said that one reason more people are being rejected is that more high school students are applying. Another is that the total number of applications is growing so fast - up 17 percent, to more than 400,000 last year.
A vast majority of Chinese, like Mr. Yu, are rejected because a visa officer makes what is often a highly subjective determination: that the applicant harbors intentions of staying on in the United States - whether legally or illegally - which disqualifies the applicant for a visa under United States law.
The interviewers, often first- or second-year Foreign Service officers, see well over 100 people a day on summer months, spending only minutes with each one. No wonder, then, that visa interview consulting booths are flourishing across from the American Embassy and Internet chat rooms are filled with hints on interview strategies.
Given handles like "Glassboy" and "Big Taiwan Mama," visa officers have become minor celebrities to desperate students, who sometimes apply more than half a dozen times. The cost is $55 a try, a standard fee that is equivalent to about a month's salary in much of China.
"Taiwan Big Ma likes short answers and transcripts," said one successful applicant, identified only as Egirl to the chat room.
An American diplomat here acknowledged that getting a visa has become "the most stressful part" of applying for study in the United States - by far the preferred destination of students. "We realize we are making life-altering decisions," he said. "But I think our people do a wonderful job given the tools we have."
If the Chinese are unhappy with high rejection rates, he said, they should not blame the visa officers, but the 50-year-old American immigration law.
Most Chinese are rejected under section 214-B of the code, which states that applicants should be denied a visa if they have "intent to immigrate," by legal means or not.
According to the law, every applicant is presumed to have "immigrant intent" until the candidate can convince an interviewer otherwise. It is a presumption that many Chinese find particularly galling. Although "innocent until proven guilty" is a basic presumption of American law, noted the article in the Beijing Youth Daily, "the applicant is assumed to be guilty of harboring a secret wish to stay in America."
But the law is also "contradictory," acknowledged the American diplomat, because it presents numerous means for students to stay on legally in the United States after their visas expire. In fact, most Chinese students who stay on in the United States do so legally, he said, by going to work for an American company or university that sponsors them. "They are people who
become very productive members of the U.S. economy - it's not a drain on the U.S. at all," he added.
Mr. Yu, the editor who was denied a visa, insists that he wants to return, but in three different visa interviews, he failed to make his case.
On June 14, his first try, questions focused on his career. He said he wanted to return to get a job with a bank in Hong Kong, Shanghai or Beijing. Result: a 214-B rejection.
On July 10, he was assigned to "the woman officer whom everyone is afraid of for her high rejection rates." She told him that, as an M.B.A., "he would have more opportunities in the U.S. than in China." 214-B again.
On Aug. 9, three days after he was to have registered at Purdue, he tried again - this time armed even with letters of support from American diplomats in Beijing. He said the visa officer asked him outright, four times, to prove he would return.
He did not quite know what to say. He mentioned friends and family in China, his goal of a bank job, and the career he has already made for himself here. "He said you have still not convinced us," recalled Mr. Yu. By then, time had run out.
The American Embassy says it tries to take into account many factors in trying to determine who might - or might not - return.
They are favorably disposed to people who have previously traveled to other countries and have returned.
Also, they look for ties that bind to China - a successful family business, a home, a car, a job already offered for their return, a spouse or child left behind.
The evaluation is not high science. Anyway, critics say, it is impossible to sort out by these crude tests which applicants intend to return.
Fang Lin, a doctor specializing in rehabilitating people who have suffered traumas like strokes or heart attacks, was invited to present a paper last December at a conference sponsored by Baylor Medical College, in Texas. Her specialty is a fledgling field in China, and she looked forward to learning from American colleagues.
Dr. Fang, 30, has worked at one of Beijing's most upscale clinics, The Friendship Hospital, since 1993. She and her husband - a successful executive - own an apartment and two cars and have traveled to Hong Kong and South Korea as tourists. He was not planning to accompany her.
Still, she was turned down twice late last year, both times for "immigrant intent;" after that, it was too late to apply again. Of the five doctors from her hospital invited to the conference, only two were approved.
"I never dreamed it would be such trouble - I was just going to a conference," she said, adding, "They think that everyone wants to leave."
Ban on Student Visas Opposed by Educators
By Dennis Wagner
The Arizona Republic
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/breaking/1004visa04.html
Higher education advocates say a proposed six-month moratorium on foreign-student visas would jolt America's universities and colleges like an aftershock from the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, damaging the nation's academic system.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is drafting legislation designed to prevent international terrorists from entering the nation with student visas. But, at least temporarily, the moratorium would turn away an estimated 120,000 foreign students. University supporters say this would wreak havoc on academia while doing little to stop terrorism.
"The loss to the United States in terms of intellectual accomplishment, goodwill and lost economic activity will be enormous," noted David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, in a letter to college presidents. "It will take decades to undo the damage that even a 'temporary' ban will create." Bob Sosa, dean of students at Arizona State University, said he understands that the terrorist threat has changed America. However, if foreign students are blocked, "They would be another group that becomes victim to what happened on September 11," he said.
Janet Haning, Arizona coordinator for the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers, said a moratorium would be devastating for small colleges such as Western International University in Phoenix, where she works.
"It would stop us completely," she said. "If this happens, I don't even know if I would have a job."
Feinstein's proposal was prompted by revelations that one of the hijackers, part-time Arizona resident Hani Hanjour, entered the United States on a student visa. According to the FBI, Hanjour flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Jim Hock, Feinstein's press secretary, said the bill faces "an uphill fight" in Congress.
He emphasized that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has just 2,000 agents assigned to keep track of more than 500,000 foreign students.
To gain better control, Feinstein is pressing for reforms such as:
* USCIS screening of student visa applicants, plus $32 million in funding for a computer tracking system,
* A requirement that schools monitor foreign students and give quarterly reports to the USCIS on their academic status and conduct,
* An electronic link allowing the USCIS to share fingerprints and records of foreign students with federal intelligence agencies.
Most education officials are going along with those reforms. But they say imposing a moratorium on visas is like punishing an entire class for the misconduct of one pupil.
Of the 19 hijackers in last month's attack, only Hanjour appears to have used a student visa to enter the United States.
A statement from the Association of International Educators says a moratorium would cripple student exchange programs and graduate schools, which rely heavily on foreign students as teaching aides.
International students obtained fewer than 2 percent of the 31 million visas issued in 1999, the last year for which records are available.
"Limiting student visa holders alone will do nothing but deny these individuals the chance to study at an American college," the Council on Education said. "These students are some of the world's best. . . . They return to their home countries as ambassadors for personal freedom and democracy."
About 3,500 of ASU's 44,000 students are foreigners, most of whom pay the premium rate of $10,354 a year for tuition and fees. If international enrollment suddenly stopped, Sosa said, it would cut a chunk of the ASU budget along with diversity on a campus that boasts students from 130 countries.
"They really add tremendous value to the education of everyone on this campus with their culture and music," he said, "and they're very seriously committed students."
The Maricopa County Community Colleges have about 480 students using foreign visas, a tiny fraction of the total enrollment, but one worth about $2 million in tuition.
Anna Solley, vice chancellor for academic affairs, said a struggle is going on to balance the interests of colleges, student privacy and national security. But she acknowledged that administrators are not comfortable with a visa moratorium or with the prospect of acting as watchdogs over international students.
USCIS freezes thousands of immigration applications
Knight Ridder Newspapers
The Arizona Republic
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/breaking/1003ins-ON.html
The Immigration and Naturalization Service has temporarily frozen potentially hundreds of thousands of immigration applications and visa petitions from those living in the United States while it conducts a national audit of immigrant applicants and assigns a bar code to every one.
Meanwhile, up to 80,000 refugees worldwide are locked out of the United States until President Bush decides how many to accept from which countries in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
USCIS officials said they plan to lift the temporary immigration hold by Oct. 9, but only if their count is complete by then.
The freeze could affect immigrants in the United States in various stages of resident status by delaying applications for permanent residence, citizenship or visa extensions.
It does not affect immigrants entering the country for the first time. They are issued temporary visas by the State Department through U.S. embassies abroad. Once in the United States, however, immigrants must apply for citizenship or extended stays through the BCIS.
In the days following last month's attacks, the nation's system for tracking immigrants and visitors has come under increased scrutiny.
USCIS Commissioner James Ziglar acknowledged Wednesday that his agency is partly to blame for security lapses.
"The structure of the organization and the management systems that we have in place are outdated and, in many respects, inadequate for the challenges we face," Ziglar said in his first testimony before Congress since his appointment two months ago. "Our information technology systems must be improved in order to ensure timely and accurate determinations."
USCIS has 1,977 investigators to deal with people who enter the country illegally, overstay their visas or otherwise violate immigration laws.
From Oct. 1, 2000, though August, 437,045 immigrants applied for U.S. citizenship, according to USCIS records. During that time period, 6.8 million immigrants applied for a variety of other immigration benefits, including visa extensions and green cards.
For now, the BCIS, a network of processing offices spread across the country and run by the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., has organized the audit to have the "least impact possible" on applicants, USCIS headquarters spokeswoman Elaine Komis said. But nobody is sure how many will be affected.
While a national audit has been done for the last two years, the bar code system has never been attempted before, USCIS officials said. Both the audit and the bar code system were proposed before the Sept. 11 attacks, Komis said.
"This inventory is not related to enforcement or investigation," Komis said. "It's simply a way for us to see how many cases we have not completed yet, and how much money is associated with that caseload."
The freeze began Sept. 30, at the end of the government's fiscal year.
Komis said the bar code information will allow the USCIS and immigrants applying for resident benefits to track individual files, and get updated information on the status of their applications.
That information, essentially a computerized database of immigrant applications, will not be shared with the FBI or the CIA, Komis said.
Immigrant advocates said they question the BCIS's ability to complete the bar code system by Oct. 9, and the motives behind the bar codes.
"It's what you do with that information that raises concerns. I have some concerns about bar coding individuals in general," said Noel Saleh, an immigration lawyer in Detroit. "It depends on how far they want to take it. I can understand the need to start using technology to keep better records." Ultimately, if the bar codes help organize USCIS records and keep people from falsifying documents, "Then I applaud it," Saleh said.
Meanwhile, no new refugees will be allowed to enter the country until Bush signs a new directive for fiscal year 2002, which began Oct. 1.
A temporary delay in processing refugees is common this time of year, as the government adjusts to a new fiscal year. But this year the hiatus is complicated by shifts in the diplomatic landscape after last month's attacks.
In the past, the White House usually issued its annual directive on refugees by late October. This year, no one is sure what will happen.
As the United States prepares for a possible war in Afghanistan, the number of people from that country seeking refuge is expected to increase. Last year, slightly more than 2,000 Afghan refugees entered the United States.
Immigration Consultants Taken to Court
Law: State accuses three Southland businesses of false advertising and legal misrepresentation. Total fines in the civil action could hit $1 million.
By Kenneth Reich
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-000079388oct04.story
State Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer filed lawsuits Wednesday against three Los Angeles area immigration consultant companies for allegedly falsely portraying themselves as lawyers, false advertising and taking advantage of immigrant clients.
Although these are not criminal charges, which are typically filed by county prosecutors, a Lockyer aide said the fines in the Los Angeles Superior Court cases could total as much as $1 million because of multiple counts, each carrying penalties of $2,500.
"It is against the law for nonlawyers to be acting as attorneys, and, in addition, they are often doing so incompetently, and taking large fees," Lockyer said. The companies named were the Immigration Solution Center, Immigration World Wide Services Inc. and Asian Pacific Legal Services. At least two area attorneys, Alexis I. Torres and Wesley Sklark, were named as
alleged accessories.
The only company that could be reached immediately was Asian Pacific Legal Services, whose founder, Walter Wenko of Monterey Park, said Lockyer "has gone off half-cocked" and predicted that his firm will be fully vindicated.
Wenko said he has been disbarred for failing to comply with a 90-day disciplinary suspension by the State Bar of California, but has hired attorneys to perform any necessary legal work for the company's clients.
Torres and Sklark are accused of improperly accepting clients referred from the non-attorney defendants in violation of the Business and Professions Code.
"I emphatically deny everything alleged about me. . . . I'll be vindicated when this thing is over," Torres said. "I'm a good attorney."
A recording on Sklark's answering machine said he did not accept calls.
The complaints released by Lockyer allege that the companies charge fees ranging from $20 to $1,500 for legal services they cannot lawfully provide and are falsely guaranteeing favorable and speedy results.
Sometimes too, "without consulting an attorney, the non-attorney defendants advised clients, at times erroneously, whether they were entitled to immigration benefits and got clients to pay to file frivolous immigration applications," Lockyer said.
Often, he said, immigrants in the United States illegally are afraid to complain to authorities when they are defrauded.
The attorney general said he is asking the courts to order restitution, enjoin the companies from continuing their practices and levy the fines.