Students slip past visa check
National program finds 36,000 immigration violations, but only 1,600 are investigated.

By Brad Heath / The Detroit News

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A government system that tracks foreign students studying in the United States has detected tens of thousands of immigration violations in the two years since it began. But few of those cases were ever investigated.

The student-tracking system, which monitors whether foreign students are living up to the terms of their student visas by staying enrolled in school, was one of a handful of high-tech measures laid out in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks to erase some of the blind spots in the nation's immigration system. But critics say it won't deliver much added security until the government does more to investigate the abuses it detects.

In its first year alone, the program, known as the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System, detected more than 36,000 potential violations of student visas nationwide, of which only 1,600 were investigated, according to the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which operates the system. Agents made 155 arrests as a result. The agency was unable to provide updated figures.

"Obviously, it's better to know than not to know when somebody breaks the law. But it would be even better to actually do something about it," said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates tighter controls on illegal immigration. "Anyone who's planning to abuse the system knows the odds are in their favor. It's like with all immigration enforcement: People know their odds of getting caught are something like their odds of winning the lottery."

That's a result, he said, of the government not having enough agents policing immigration laws. Even so, he added, just having the system in place is an improvement.

Before the system was launched in 2003, the student visa program was badly organized and widely exploited. At least one of the September 11 hijackers entered the United States on a student visa, and six months after the attacks, the government issued student visas to two others hijackers to attend a flight school in Florida. Thousands of people who entered the country on student visas stayed illegally after finishing school -- or never enrolled. Congress spent $36.8 million to create the system ; most of the costs are paid by students, who must pay fees of up to $100 to be registered in it.

College officials and federal auditors say many of the technical headaches that accompanied the new system have been largely resolved.

"I can't say there isn't a glitch here and there, but on the main it seems to be working fairly well," said Peter Briggs, the director of the Office of International Students and Scholars at Michigan State University. "Now we're almost a poster child for how technology can make things more efficient, and I think that's one of the unexpected outcomes."

At first, colleges worried the prospect of such detailed tracking -- monitoring how many classes students are taking to be sure they are in compliance with their visa -- would scare away potential students.

On top of that, the technical problems were maddening: Student records vanished. At MSU, workers who tried to print one student's forms said the papers ended up in Arizona instead.

In a review this year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, said technical complaints are less common. But it also warned that fixing mistakes in the government records can still take months or years, throwing some students' immigration status into doubt until those problems are resolved. But there are still problems.
http://www.detnews.com/2005/schools/0509/19/A01-319221.htm