Foul-ups test foreign students and schools

WASHINGTON, DC — The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) for tracking foreign students is: 1) technologically flawed; 2) functioning poorly; 3) a disaster; 4) a crisis; or, 5) all those and more, according to witnesses who gave testimony March 26 at a House Committee on Science hearing on visa backlogs. Committee members and witnesses discussed the importance of foreign students, particularly graduate students, to US science, as well as specific incidents involving foreign students blocked from entering or returning to the US because of visa-processing problems. But particularly unhappy testimony focused on the new SEVIS student-tracking system. "The damn thing doesn't work," David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, told The Scientist, after the hearing Wednesday. "It's a great idea, but there's been no meeting of the minds among the agencies that are supposed to make it work. "It was unrealistic to expect a computer system this complicated to be fabricated correctly in less than nine months," Ward said. "There weren't enough pilots or enough diagnostics before the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] implemented SEVIS in January. Now our campuses are paying the price." According to Princeton University president Shirley Tilghman, the price at that school has been more than $38,000: $15,000 for software to facilitate batch transfer of data, $5,000 for a new server and thousands more for maintenance agreements, test servers and added personnel costs, including an IT expert assigned to focus primarily on maintaining the school's SEVIS reporting system.INS had promised that the Web-based SEVIS would seamlessly substitute an all-electronic foreign student reporting and tracking system for the agency's cumbersome paper-based system. Tilghman noted that universities have expected SEVIS since 1996, when Congress directed the INS to develop an electronic foreign student tracking system. But when the 2001 USA Patriot Act required SEVIS to be implemented by January 1, 2003, the INS was forced to scramble. In a report released last week, the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) stated that INS's successor, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (BICE) had failed to certify 893 schools and universities by its Feb. 15 deadline — which the BICE had postponed from its original Jan. 31 target date — and that it had inadequately examined contractors hired to determine whether universities were authentic educational institutions. According to the OIG report, the immigration bureau claimed to have had met the congressionally imposed deadline because it had established a Web site that schools could visit. To illustrate remaining imperfections in the SEVIS system, Ward told the House committee about several incidents, including workers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who found their confidential forms printed at a proprietary school in San Francisco; a campus official who recently visited an immigration bureau regional service center and was asked to help the officials understand what they were supposed to do; and foreign students who in February received their I-20 student visa forms but couldn't apply because the SEVIS data hadn't been forwarded to the appropriate consulate. "Two factors make this situation even more worrisome," Ward's prepared statement said. "First, the volume of information is about to increase dramatically. Between now and August 1, we conservatively estimate an additional one million records will need to be entered in SEVIS. We do not believe there is any chance that SEVIS will be able to accommodate the surge of information and are deeply concerned that it will play havoc with students, colleges, universities and consular and immigration offices."Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) said that this was only the second in a long series of hearings on how the war on terrorism is affecting the nation's research enterprise. But echoing previous statements by National Academies of Science chiefs and others, Boehlert said that thinking of these visa difficulties as a problem to be balanced against a need for national security is a distorted view. "Unnecessarily impeding the flow of students and scholars in and of itself can erode our national security," he said.The Science Committee also released a letter it sent Wednesday to the General Accounting Office, requesting better data on the extent and nature of the visa backlog.

Foul-ups test foreign students and schools

Congressional committee hears tales of ongoing problems with visas and SEVIS.

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