When travelers at US airports bitch at having to take off their shoes at gate security the staff quip: “Be glad Richard Reid didn’t hide the bomb in his underpants.” Since Sept. 11, airport security has been overhauled by the federally appointed Transport Security Administration.
There are innumerable pre-boarding delays. And do passengers feel safer as they file through the long lines at LAX or JFK? They certainly feel more nervous. America is currently in the business of exporting “freedom” globally — even to countries which seem indifferent to the idea. Yet the US itself is becoming, month by month, a palpably less free society. Much of the change is attributable to the Patriot Act, whose Mel Gibsonish acronym stands for “Provision of Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”. In short: “Hassle”. Nowhere is the hassle more oppressive than in higher education. If airline passengers are grateful Reid didn’t hide the explosives in his boxers, university officials curse the fact that those murderous Sept. 11 terrorists were, many of them, in the US on student visas.
The Patriot Act impacts painfully on American universities. Campus police are obliged, under the pretext of “homeland security”, to liaise with the FBI. So, to their indignation, are college librarians (“What is Ali reading?”). The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) requires universities to provide confidential information about their Middle Eastern and Muslim students — those from countries suspected of “harboring” Al-Qaeda (“Who is Ali e-mailing?”).
In February 2003, the INS began fingerprinting 44,000 immigrants from specified Arab and Islamic countries. Students were overwhelmingly targeted. Those I spoke to felt grossly humiliated by the experience of being treated like drunk drivers. The net is widening. At the beginning of this month, American college officials were required to register all foreign students with federal authorities under the provisions of Sevis, the newly established student and exchange visitor information service. The aim is to compile a comprehensive and “dynamic” (i.e., constantly updated) database, monitoring every overseas student in the US.
New York, traditionally the open door to America, has protested vociferously. “It couldn’t have been done worse,” says Gail Szenes, director of New York University’s office for international students and scholars. Renewal of visas for overseas students has become a nightmare. There are deportations on grounds of incomplete documentation.
Even more nightmarish is the situation for those applying from outside. In order to get into the Sevis system, applicants must first be interviewed by US officials in the would-be student’s home country. It can take a year to get through the necessary hoops and bottlenecks. Nor, as the bureaucracy expands, is it just applicants from terrorist-harboring states. Tony Blair may have the congressional medal of freedom: But his son Euan, if he wants to study in the land of the free, will have to take his place in the Sevis queue.
In an article published on Aug. 27 (“Foreign students need not apply”) Catharine Stimpson, dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences at NYU, complains bitterly that “Some of our most talented applicants have been rejected after five minutes or less of questioning, with no indication as to why.” Sevis’s inefficiencies, she says, “would be laughable if a student’s education were not on the line”.
From her office, Stimpson can see the ugly gap in the skyline where the twin towers used to be. But Sevis does not make her, as a citizen, feel safer: It makes her, as an educator, feel poorer.
One third of all “American” Nobel prizewinners, Stimpson points out, were not born in America. Nearly 50 percent of graduates in subjects such as engineering have, traditionally, been “international”. No more. It is sad to see a great country systematically divesting itself of some of the very qualities that made it great. They should rename it the Statue of Security.
- Arab News Opinion 2 September 2003
