 The Department of Homeland Security says 6,000 of them represent a national
security threat, but the DHS admits it has no idea where they are.
While the 6,000 are considered subjects of interest, DHS says it has lost track
of 58,000 foreigners who entered the U.S. on student visas.
“They just disappear,” U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told ABC News. “They get
the visas and they disappear.”
Most of the 9/11 hijackers were in the U.S. on expired student visas. Coburn
said that since those attacks, the government had arrested 26 foreigners with
student visas for terrorism-related activities.
As for the rest?
“My greatest concern is that they could be doing anything,” said Peter Edge, an
Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. “Some of them could be here to do
us harm.”
Experts say the government’s admitted inability to track student visas exposes
economic and educational concerns, too.
“Over and above any security worries, DHS does not pay attention to the mild
accreditation standards of its sister agency, the Department of Education, and
permits the operation of schools that are not accredited by DoE-recognized
entities,” David North, a policy analyst with the Center for Immigration
Studies, told Watchdog.org.
“As a result there are visa mills that continue to ‘teach’ ‘students’ in cases
where the schools should be closed and the students sent home,” North said.
“Nominally in charge of all this is the Student Exchange Visitor Program — one
of the sleepiest federal agencies in existence,” he said.
[to top of second column] |
John Miano, a New Jersey lawyer and former tech worker, debunks
the notion that out-of-status foreign students are landing
high-paying jobs and displacing their college counterparts.
“Clearly, overstays are a large part of the illegal-alien
population,” Miano told Watchdog. “It appears to me that illegal
immigration is the largest force that businesses use to drive down
wages of the low-skilled workforce.”
Donna Conroy, director of Bright Future Jobs, an advocacy
organization for tech employees, said foreign nationals holding
student visas may participate in the federal Optional Practical
Training program for high-skill workers.
But despite widely reported surveillance activities by the National
Security Agency, Conroy said “there is no tracking mechanism to
monitor and audit” students who overstay their visas.
At a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing in 2011, Sen. Rand
Paul, R-Ky., re-raised the possibility that foreign students could
pose national-security threats.
The Republican senator’s concerns were validated after Azamat
Tazhayakov, a student from Kazakhstan on an expired visa, was
implicated in the Boston bombing.
“If we had a more competent visa program, we might have prevented
9/11,” Paul said.
Kenric Ward is a national reporter for Watchdog.org. Contact him at
(571) 319-9824. @Kenricward
[This
article courtesy of
Watchdog.]
Click here to respond to the editor about this
article.
 |
