American Immigration Law Foundation
Fact Sheet
Monitoring Foreign Students in the U.S.
- The number of foreign students on America's college and university
campuses has grown from 34,232 in 1955 to 514,723 in 2000, an increase of
4.8% over the previous year. The leading country of origin is China, with
54,466 students make up 10.5% of the total population. The next highest
countries are Japan (46,872), India (42,337), and Korea (41,191). There are
6,107 students from Pakistan, 1,185 from Iran, 641 from Syria, 112 from
Iraq, and 110 students from Afghanistan.
- The majority of foreign students are admitted with F-1 visas and attend
colleges and universities. To obtain a visa, the student must first be
accepted for admission by the school, then the institution issues INS Form
I-20, which confirms for the government that the student is scheduled to
study at a particular college.
- Colleges and universities must apply for permission to their local INS
office for permission to issue Form I-20. There are thousands of colleges
and universities in the country authorized by INS to have foreign students
on campus.
- After receipt of an I-20 from a school, the alien takes this form to an
American consulate or embassy and is interviewed by a consular officer. If
the consular officer grants approval, a visa is issued and the student may
enter the United States.
- Upon arrival on campus, the school must verify that the alien has
completed his enrollment, notifying INS of any students who have not
appeared on campus. Foreign students are generally admitted for
"duration of status", which means they may remain in the U.S. as
long as they are still enrolled in an approved college or university.
- After the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, when the INS found it had no
accurate records about the foreign student population, it significantly
revised the regulations governing foreign students and in 1983 required that
all colleges and universities go through a "redesignation" process
with INS.
- Schools were also required to begin annual reports to INS on each
institution's foreign student population, providing the students' names and
current addresses. The first collection of this information occurred in
1985. A second collection was not sent to all schools again until three
years later, in 1988. And in 1989, a small sample of ten schools were asked
to report on their student populations.
- No further reporting has been requested by INS since that time (12 years).
The main reason for INS suspension of the data collection was computer
problems that prevented it from accurately processing the information
provided by schools.
- After the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, FBI Director
Louis Freeh began to focus on the lack of accurate information about the
foreign student population. A law enforcement task force recommended the
creation of a new electronic tracking program to monitor foreign students
and scholars.
- CIPRIS (Coordinated Interagency Partnership for Regulating International
Students) was created by INS and included representatives from the State
Department, the U.S. Information Agency, the Department of Education, and a
handful of college campuses. Working over a 4 year period, they created an
electronic version of Form I-20 and had approximately 20 schools in a
handful of southern states enter data directly into a new centralized INS
database. Special ID cards were also issued to all students on those
campuses.
- Among the information to be tracked under CIPRIS would be student name and
address, student major field of study, any disciplinary action by the
college against the student, and any criminal information of which the
school might become aware. A new fee of $100 would also be required of every
foreign student to underwrite the cost of the tracking system.
- The Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 mandated
in statute that INS fully implement the CIPRIS system by 2001. INS found it
could not address all technical problems and asked Congress for an extension
of the 2001 deadline. Additional testing of the system has been done at
Boston area colleges in the spring of 2001.
- Recently the academic community had expressed significant reservations
about the CIPRIS tracking program (now renamed by bureaucrats as the SEVP
system, Student Exchange Visitor Program). Among the college and university
community's initial concerns are that they would be forced to collect the
fee on INS' behalf, and that they would have to assume a monitoring role of
students that more properly should be done by law enforcement officials, not
educators. At the academic community's bequest, legislation has been
introduced to repeal the tracking program.
- The system is not yet ready for nationwide implementation, despite seven
years of testing.
