Student Visas = Cheap Labor
Student Visas = Cheap Labor
Date: Tuesday, June 04, 2002 11:16 AM
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Keep in mind that all the low paid foreign students that this article
talks
are on J-1 student visas. The universities like to keep them on as H-1B
post
docs so they can get many more years of labor out of their indentured
slaves. Almost 60% of the Post Docs are now H-1Bs and they are exempted
from
the yearly limit.
Go 1976 at http://www.zazona.com/ShameH1B/H1BHistory.htm to see how
Universities engineered the H-1B program with the Eilberg Ammendment.
http://www.nationalreview.com/issue/borjas061702.asp
June 2, 2002, 8:45 a.m.
Rethinking Foreign Students
A question of the national interest.
By George J. Borjas, from the June 17, 2002, issue of National Review
Many foreign leaders - the Philippines' Corazon Aquino and Israel's Ehud
Barak, to name just two - obtained part of their education in the United
States. Such training may be one of America's highest valued exports: By
giving future foreign leaders firsthand exposure to our system of
government, we are presumably building a safer, freer, and more
prosperous
world.
Another foreign student, Hani Hasan Hanjour, got a visa to study English
at
ELS Language Centers, a Berlitz-owned school that leases space at a
local
college in Oakland, Calif. He did not attend a single class. Instead, he
became one of the terrorists in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon
on
September 11. And two other terrorists were waiting for the official
approval of their student visas to attend flight school - an approval
that
the Immigration and Naturalization Service dutifully mailed out six
months
after the attacks.
In 1971, the State Department issued only 65,000 student visas. By 2000,
it
was issuing 315,000 such visas, and there may now be as many as 1
million
foreign students in the U.S. The increase in the size of this program
has
transformed the typical American university, and the impact is
especially
striking in particular fields: Foreign students receive 35 percent of
the
doctorates awarded in the physical sciences, and 49 percent of those in
engineering.
The program is now so large, so riddled with corruption, and so ineptly
run
that the INS simply does not know how many foreign students are in the
country or where they are enrolled. It has grown explosively without
anyone
asking the most basic questions: Is such a large-scale foreign-student
program in our interests? What does it cost us? And what does it buy us?
A TICKET TO THE U.S.
A foreigner who wishes to study in the U.S. starts by applying for
admission
to an educational or vocational institution. To qualify for a student
visa,
he must be accepted by an INS-approved school; he must enroll in it
full-time; and he must have sufficient funds for self-support.
When the student is admitted into a program, the school sends him a Form
I-20 ("Certificate of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant Student Status"). The
student takes this form to the local consulate. A consular official
interviews him and reviews the application before deciding whether to
grant
a visa. If the student was accepted by several U.S. schools, as is
common,
that student has received several I-20s. Inevitably, there are numerous
reports of a black market for the unused I-20s in many countries.
But once a student enters the U.S., there is practically no monitoring
of
him: The schools do not even have to report whether the student actually
enrolled. Recently, the Bush administration has proposed an
Internet-based
system to track these students: Each school would record any changes in
a
student's address, major, or enrollment status. But this approach will
probably not be very effective, since the INS lacks the resources to
take
any action if, for example, the University of Southern California
reports
that ten of its foreign students dropped out in the past semester. There
are
already 10 million illegal aliens in the country; does anyone believe
that
the INS can somehow find those extra ten?
Indeed, many foreigners want to study in the U.S. precisely because a
student visa buys them a ticket into the country. Between 1971 and 1991,
just over 3 million persons received student visas, and 393,000 of them
were
able to eventually adjust their immigration status and obtain a "green
card," or permanent-residence visa. Only about 13 percent of the
students
remain here in this legal manner; others remain illegally, and the lax
monitoring system has surely encouraged many to do so. Around 10 percent
of
the 3 million illegal aliens who received amnesty in the late 1980s were
persons with temporary visas, many of them foreign students, who had
remained in the country after their visas had expired.
Although it might seem that a student visa does not buy much of a chance
of
moving permanently to the U.S., the chances would be far smaller without
it.
Foreigners have very few options for migrating legally to the U.S.
unless
they already have relatives residing here. One potential avenue is to
enter
the "diversity lottery," in which 50,000 permanent-residence visas are
raffled off each year. The last lottery attracted 10 million applicants,
so
the chance of winning a green card was only 0.5 percent, far smaller
than
the chances provided by a student visa.
It would seem that a major roadblock in obtaining a student visa is that
the
applicant must be admitted by an INS-approved educational institution.
There
are, however, around 73,000 schools that are certified to hand out
I-20s. It
is eye-opening to browse through the actual list. In the San Diego area
alone, the INS grants its seal of approval to nearly 400 institutions,
ranging from the University of California at San Diego to Avance Beauty
College, the College of English Language (where new courses start every
Monday), the Asian American Acupuncture University, and the San Diego
Golf
Academy. Because there are so many INS- approved institutions, anyone
with
the money can buy a student visa to enter the U.S. America has
effectively
delegated the task of selecting immigrants to thousands of privately run
entities whose incentives need not coincide with the national interest.
Consider the financial incentives of large research universities. These
institutions need workers to staff their science labs and teaching
assistants to assign to large undergraduate classes, and they would
prefer
to fill these positions at low salaries. Foreign students provide an
almost
limitless supply of willing workers. Similarly, the owners of privately
run
vocational schools benefit by having more tuition-paying students, and
they
have a huge incentive to sell visas under the guise of a foreign-student
program.
There are widespread reports that the program has corrupted the
admission
and education standards at some schools. A well-publicized example
involved
a San Diego-area businessman who received between $200,000 and $300,000
to
procure student visas for Middle Eastern students. In this intricate
scheme,
an admissions officer accepted bribes to admit the students, and
professors
at three different colleges sold passing grades.
There is even more corruption abroad. Because the foreign-student
program
provides a rare opportunity for migrating to the U.S., there is a
thriving
industry of consulting firms that grease the wheels of the process. The
demand for student visas by Chinese nationals is so strong that,
according
to a U.S. consular official in Beijing, a fee of $10,000 buys phony
letters
of recommendation, false evidence of economic support, and even
professional
actors to stand in during the interview with consular officials.
The Internet has numerous websites of firms that guide prospective
students
for a fee. In India, the Foreign Studies Service Bureau will guarantee
an
I-20 form for about $800, and they even list the schools where the
potential
student can be enrolled. The list of 92 schools is topped by the
University
of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale.
(The FSSB removed the fee information from its website soon after the
first
draft of this article began circulating.)
There is healthy competition among these firms. A South Korean
immigration
attorney gives some fatherly advice: "There are probably hundreds of
'YooHakWon' in Seoul, all specializing in helping students find a school
in
the United States . . . There are advantages and disadvantages in
retaining
their services. The advantage is that they will probably help you obtain
an
I-20 Form . . . The disadvantage is that the school chosen for you may
not
be the right school for you . . . All 'YooHakWons' in Korea receive a
commission from a school in the United States when they introduce a
student
to them . . . They may try to introduce you to a school from which they
receive a commission, rather than finding a school which is right for
you."
In short, the INS relegated the vetting of prospective students to an
amazingly large number of institutions that benefit financially from the
presence of foreign students, and to foreign consultants who brazenly
misuse, distort, and pervert the system. This corrupt outcome has little
to
do with whatever noble goals motivate the program's existence.
THE ACADEMY SCAM
And to whose benefit? A study by the National Academy of Sciences
concluded
that all of the immigration over the past few decades increased the
income
accruing to natives by less than $10 billion a year. Of that $10 billion
contribution, very little - less than $1 billion - can be attributed to
foreign students, who account for less than 2 percent of all permanent
immigrants.
The net gain to the country may be small - but the higher-education
industry
can benefit substantially. Foreign students are an important part of the
workforce in many universities. Wages and salaries in this sector are
around
$50 billion annually. If the huge influx of foreign-student workers
lowered
wages by only 5 percent, the payroll savings would be around $2 billion
each
year, transferring a significant amount of wealth from workers to
management
in that industry.
Taxpayers also lose. The tuition that colleges charge is not typically
enough to cover the cost of an education. Gordon Winston, former provost
of
Williams College, estimates that the average per-student subsidy is
$6,400
in private universities and $9,200 in public universities. The 275,000
foreign students enrolled in public institutions are subsidized to the
tune
of $2.5 billion a year. This subsidy is so large that the
foreign-student
program may actually generate a net loss for the U.S.
The typical discussion of foreign students' contributions tends to
remain on
the level of sweeping platitudes. For example, Michael Becraft, former
acting deputy commissioner of the INS, has said: "Foreign-student
programs
have been found to serve U.S. foreign-policy objectives by exposing
nationals of other countries to the institutions and culture of the
United
States, by helping to cement alliances with other countries, and by
transferring knowledge and skills to other countries, particularly
developing countries." And David Ward, president of the American Council
on
Education, recently testified: "Without exception, I found [foreign
students] to be diligent and hard-working individuals who . . . helped
expose American-born students to the world that they would encounter
after
graduating from college."
There is, in fact, little evidence to support any of these claims. If
exposure to foreign students is so valuable to American students -
preparing
them for "the world that they would encounter after graduating" - why do
we
not see foreign countries offering thousands of dollars to induce
Americans
to attend foreign universities? Those countries have much more to gain
by
exposing their students to Americans. We are the world's largest market,
and
our culture and politics dominate world affairs. Yet France has managed
with
fewer than 12,000 American students, and Germany with fewer than 5,000.
There is also the argument that the U.S. gains because the
foreign-student
program lets us skim the best talent from other countries. But over half
of
the foreign students who end up staying in the country do so not because
of
exceptional skills or because they are swamped by job offers after
graduation, but simply because they marry an American. And the methods
foreigners use to obtain student visas, and the ones American
institutions
use to recruit them, do not boost our confidence that only the best and
the
brightest show up on our doorstep.
One could plausibly argue that foreign students have lowered the quality
of
undergraduate education. Undergraduates often charge that the poor
English
of many foreign-born teaching assistants impede their understanding of
the
material. And there is evidence that foreign-born teaching assistants do
indeed have an adverse effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born
undergraduates, as measured by student grades and test scores.
BREACH OF SECURITY
But the issue that generated the most concern in the wake of the
September
11 attacks was not that the benefits of the foreign-student program are
greatly exaggerated; it was that foreign students might be a physical
threat
to Americans. Hence the INS's development of the computerized system to
track the students.
Yet the security problems would not be solved even if it were possible
to
track every single student most of the time. By delegating the
responsibility for selecting students to 73,000 private entities, the
INS
persists in creating security problems. To take just one example, 14
Syrian
men with student visas arrived in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport in
October
2001. They were all to be enrolled in a flight school, Delta-Qualiflight
Aeronautics, which enrolls a very large number of Middle Eastern
students.
In fact, Arabic is the main language spoken at that school. That
school's
admission policy would surely raise concerns if it were reviewed by an
independent agency; but there is no independent review.
The September attacks raise an even more important question about the
student-worker program. The U.S. has traditionally banned the export of
goods that it considers vital to national security, such as
supercomputers,
encryption technology, and material that can be used to produce weapons
of
mass destruction. Yet no similar ban exists on the knowledge that can be
acquired in American universities and exported abroad. And the potential
for
this kind of abuse is not hypothetical: Consider the history of Dr.
Rihab
Rashida Taha. She obtained a Ph.D. in biology at the University of East
Anglia in the United Kingdom. Her studies were funded by the Iraqi
ministry
of higher education, and her doctoral research was on plant poisons.
Upon
returning to Iraq, "Dr. Germ," as she is now known in the British
tabloids,
became the head of Saddam Hussein's bio-terrorism team.
Professor Paula Stephan of Georgia State University recently compiled
statistics on doctorates awarded to students originating in countries
targeted for increased security monitoring, including Algeria, Egypt,
Iran,
Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Between 1981 and 1999, students from
those
countries received 111 doctorates in nuclear and organic chemistry, with
40
of them going to Iraqi students; 434 doctorates in chemical and nuclear
engineering, with 106 going to Iraqis; and 112 doctorates in atomic and
nuclear physics, with 31 going to Iraqis.
The Bush administration recently proposed that a government panel review
the
applications of foreign students who want to study in sensitive areas;
but
this is likely to be an ineffective response. The panel may need to
screen
as many as 2,000 applications per year, and it will get little
cooperation
from the universities: According to the Associated Press, a lobbyist for
the
universities - seemingly oblivious to the potentially catastrophic cost
of a
security breach - is complaining that the panel's review "could delay
entry
into the country and prevent people from enrolling at the beginning of a
school term."
Eventually, the U.S. will have to confront an unpalatable policy
decision:
Should foreign students belonging to particular national-origin groups
be
barred from entering particular types of educational programs?
OUT OF CONTROL
The foreign-student program has been spinning out of control for years.
The
terrorist attacks motivated California Democratic senator Dianne
Feinstein
to propose a six-month moratorium on student visas, giving the INS a
breathing period to put the program under tighter control. After intense
lobbying by the nation's universities, however, Feinstein withdrew her
proposal.
It's not politically correct to say so, but the foreign-student program
may
not be all that beneficial. Once we stop humming the Ode to Diversity
that
plays such a central role in the modern secular liturgy, we will
recognize
that the time has come for a fundamental reevaluation of the program:
Why
should American taxpayers subsidize the tuition of the hundreds of
thousands
of foreign students enrolled in public universities? Is it sensible to
give
so many different institutions the authority to admit foreign students?
Can
we afford to ignore the national-security rationale for keeping some
educational programs off-limits to students from particular countries?
The
remarkably powerful combination of INS ineptitude and the greed of the
higher-education sector has perverted what seemed to be a sensible and
noble
effort into an economically dubious proposition and a national-security
fiasco. The foreign-student program shows yet again how our immigration
policy has failed to serve the national interest.
- George J. Borjas is a professor of public policy at the John F.
Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard.
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