John Judis, guest blogging for Josh Marshall, has an articulate post about the Bush administration's tightening up of foreign student visa rules.
Now it's true that several of the 11 September hijackers entered the U.S. on student visas, and that they never showed up at the English language school they were supposedly entering. And the ability of the [former]INS, now BCIS, to track foreign students was pretty much non-existent.
But the response of the Bush administration has been to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater; in this case to create a lot of obstacles for legitimate students who make a great contribution to American universities and the American economy.
To wit, students from China (!) have been particularly slowed in their visa applications. Whatever the other merits or demerits of having lots of Chinese graduate students enter the country, no-one to my knowledge has ever suggested that China was sending lots of potential terrorists to the United States.
Moreover, the 11 September hijackers all enrolled in privately operated English language schools. These kinds of operations are certainly deserving of more scrutiny.
But students coming to study at major universities, and those who come from non-Islamic countries are not where the risk lies.
As Judis says, international educational exchange is so fundamental to making long-term allies in foreign countries that the U.S. should be offering more opportunities to the best students in Islamic and Arab countries to come to the U.S. to study. Of course, some oversight is necessary, but the long-term payoff of giving future opinion leaders the opportunity to see America up close, is great enough to outweigh the slight risks.
[Update: 30 June 2004]: an op-ed in the WaPo addresses the same issues.
Posted by robe0419 at June 23, 2004 12:23 PM