Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2003 Student Work

In post-9/11 crackdown, foreign researchers in high-tech fields find they may be barred from entering America

By Allison Hoffman

The numbers stand out in lurid red on the website of the Columbia University Chinese Students Association, like tallies on the walls of a prison: 99, 105, 272. They mark the number of days Chinese students accepted into graduate programs at universities across the United States have been waiting for their entry visas to be approved by consular officials.

Some of the website entries have comments alongside them. "It's mental torture and time loss. . ." reads one from a Cornell civil engineer in Guangzhou. "I don't understand how I could threaten American people's security with my knowledge of heat flux and temperature distribution," wonders a mechanical engineer in Shanghai. A student doing research in microelectronics who has been waiting 105 days writes, "Every time I call the consulate, I get the same answer: pending."

Most of the students, brandishing fresh university acceptance letters, are applying for first-time entry to the United States. Others, like a University of Colorado electrical engineer who flew to Beijing after his grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, have already been studying at American universities for several years, but got caught abroad when visa rules changed. All of them have fallen through the bureaucratic cracks opened by the reinforcement of a special visa review program that applies to foreign students doing scientific research. Code-named MANTIS, the program is a bulwark in the government's effort to prevent possible terrorists or rogue states from getting their hands on potentially lethal technologies.

Xiaomei Jiang's entry is in there, too: it's been 207 days since she applied for her re-entry papers last September. Xiaomei, a doctoral student in physics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, was a month away from defending her dissertation on plastic laser technology when she got word that her parents had been in a car accident in her hometown, in rural Sichuan province. Her mother, Duan, was killed instantly; her father, Jiang, lay in a coma. Xiaomei, her husband Jian, and her 8-year-old daughter Ailin took the first flight to China, without waiting for the university to issue them I-20 exit visa documents before they left. Ten days after the family arrived, Xiaomei's mother died.

After arranging for funeral services, the Jiangs called the American consulate in Chengdu to apply for re-entry visas to return to Salt Lake City. Two weeks later, the family hadn't heard anything back; a month later, they were told that Xiaomei's application had been referred to State Department officials in Washington for review. She had become a checkee.

Checkees-visa applicants whose files are passed from consular officials abroad to the State Department in Washington for assessment-have existed since 1994, when a spate of immigration controls were passed in the wake of the first World Trade Center bomb attack. The procedure for sending suspect applications for review was revamped, and consular officers were made individually accountable in the event that one of their visa applicants commits a terrorist act, increasing the pressure to send applications for checking.

MANTIS was put in place in 1998 to address concerns that students, researchers, and other workers on temporary visas were acquiring state secrets or technology that could be turned against the United States. Under MANTIS, consular officials are required to check student visa applications against a Technology Alert List of 15 broad categories of study that trigger review from Washington, all relating to nuclear research, chemical or biological engineering, imaging and cryptography. Students from an all-star version of the so-called "Axis of Evil"-Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria-applying to study anything even marginally to do with technologies on the hot list are automatically checked by the State Department. In addition, scientists from China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia are given special review under provisions relating to non-proliferation of nuclear and other weapons.

Hysteria about the security threat posed by foreign scientists reached fever pitch in 1999 following the arrest and detention of Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was accused of spying and stealing nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos laboratories. But the allegations were disproved, and by 2000, the number of student visa applications sent to the State Department for MANTIS review had tapered off at about 1,000 a year.

The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which were carried out by student visa holders, revived awareness of the program. The president issued a directive expressly prohibiting "the education and training of foreign nationals who would use such training to harm the United States or its Allies," and the number of student visa cases sent for checking has skyrocketed to over 14,000 annually, creating an enormous backlog for the State Department visa services division and long delays for the students patiently waiting to get to work on their research.

Xiaomei, at 33, has a confident, sunny grin. The eldest of four sisters, she grew up poor in Sichuan; her parents gave up their youngest child for adoption by a rich family in the city, a common practice among the poor in the countryside. She majored in physics at Sichuan University, but dropped out so that her parents could afford to send both her younger sisters, Xiaoai and Yuhong, to university. Both girls eventually won doctoral grants at universities in the United States-Xiaoai at the University of Michigan, Yuhong at Yale. At 28, married and with a young daughter, Xiaomei decided to follow in their footsteps, and was offered a spot in the University of Utah lab to pursue a doctorate in laser technology. But stuck back in China after her parents' deaths, she was plagued by filial guilt. "Perhaps I deserve this: I left my parents to be killed and now God is punishing me, my daughter, and my husband," Xiaomei wrote Yuhong.

Yuhong Jiang works as a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and she has been hired as an assistant professor at Harvard. She also went home for her parents' funeral, but because she studies psychology, a subject that's not on the hot list, she was able to return to Boston without hassle last September. "I know the checks are necessary," she admits. "The problem is that the procedure is opaque. A month is something you can accept, but this is counterproductive."

When MANTIS was first launched, the State Department guaranteed that they would respond to checks within 30 days; if the consulate heard nothing within that time frame, it could issue the visa. That guarantee was suspended in the spring of 2002 after a second program, code-named CONDOR, was launched. CONDOR screens for potential terrorists against a list of suspect nationalities and FBI records, and requires that certain visa applications be sent directly to Washington for cross-checking against databases of known terrorists. Because all visa checks go through a single office in Washington, CONDOR increased the amount of time it takes for reviews to be processed, and consular officials must now wait for specific clearance before they can issue visas.

The problems with MANTIS and CONDOR were compounded by the reorganization of immigration functions within the newly established Department of Homeland Security early this year. The bureaucratic shuffle has distracted attention from the ballooning backlog of delayed visa applications, estimated at anywhere between 14,000 and 25,000. Responsibility for solving the crisis lies in the gap between two new agencies, the Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Services and the Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement.

Another aspect of the problem, as Janice Jacobs, the assistant deputy for visa services at the State Department, stated in testimony before the House Committee on Science in late March, is that the technology alert categories are vague, and the consular employees who must evaluate applications against them rarely have any background in science. University sponsors, who under different circumstances might be more vocal in defending their students' applications through the checking process, have themselves been preoccupied with fulfilling their responsibilities under a new, federally mandated tracking system for foreign students, called SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System).

"The check is to make sure that what they learned in graduate school won't be supersensitive high-tech that will give them the potential to build nuclear weapons," Yuhong says. "But my sister is a theoretical physicist-nothing she studies has practical application yet. The consulate doesn't understand that, so my sister and her husband and Ailin wait and wait."

Estimates of the number of students and researchers affected vary widely. The American Association of Universities conducted a survey of 20 top research universities in October 2002 and found that the number of students missing the start of classes because of visa delays had doubled from 134 to 357-still only 2.8 percent of the total number of international students at those universities, but still a significant number, given that many worked in small labs of 10 or 15 researchers. A similar pattern emerged for students receiving visa denials, and fully 84 percent of the 600 students affected were scientists from China, Russia, or Arab and Muslim countries.

That survey also accounted only for new students, and left out people like Xiaomei who had already been legally admitted to the United States for study but found themselves unable to return because of the new rules. Gary Downey, the president of the Council for the Society for the Social Studies of Science, said, "There's no hard data. It's hard to collect numbers from people who don't come here, or who give up." He believes that an increase in delays and denials under clause 214(b), which requires students to show intent to return to their home countries after their studies are completed, reflects laziness or, worse, paranoia on the part of officials under pressure not to admit the wrong people by accident. "It's increasingly clear that 214(b) has become a catch-all for consular officers."

The delays don't just derail the lives of the foreign scientists; they also threaten the progress of research at labs whose grants will run out whether their researchers are there to conduct experiments or not. "I cannot overstate how disruptive this procedure is to scientists whose life is help up by endless scrutiny, and to the development of science and research in the US," Yuhong says.

In late 2002, the quiet rumble of discontent from universities and research institutions, which are in large part dependent on government grants for their work, rose to a full outcry as the three presidents of the National Academies of the Sciences issued a joint letter of protest. They wrote, "The list of those who have been prevented from entering the United States includes scholars asked to speak at major conferences, distinguished professors invited to teach at our universities, and even foreign associates of our Academies."

More seriously, the letter accused the new procedures of adding to existing security threats by fueling anti-Americanism abroad. The case of a delegation of several hundred Pakistani doctoral students, who were specially selected by their government to study in the United States but 90 percent of whom were denied visas, was raised as an example. To those who question the value of foreign students in American research universities, the three wrote that foreign scholars "harness international cooperation for counterterrorism," "build alliances through scientific and technological cooperation" on combating problems like AIDS, and help maintain America's role as the breeding ground for new technologies, which in turn enables the government to have some control over their proliferation. The statement was echoed by releases from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.

The letter, which received widespread attention in the scientific press and set off mainstream media reports on the issue, raised flags in the government. Sherwood Boehlert, the chairman of the House Committee on Science, called for testimony from the State Department. A Republican from New York, Boehlert reminded the officials who came before him in March that the Manhattan Project "was not named for the hometown of the people who worked on it." He was outspoken about the scale of the problem, saying, "When we have a system that casts so wide a net that we can't focus on real threats, that's bad for our security. When we have a tracking system that creates undue burdens on the flow of students, that's a threat to our security."

In his testimony, David Ward, the president of the American Council on Education, reminded officials that the delays could have an economic impact as well. International students spend an estimated $12 billion per year in the United States, and a reduction in their numbers as students go to other countries-Canada, Germany, Australia-for their research could have a negative effect. In addition, he said, international conferences were beginning to relocate outside the United States to avoid visa problems for people trying to attend, draining conference dollars from local economies and limiting the free flow of scientific information worldwide.

Despite the increased attention to the crisis, few practical solutions for balancing security concerns against the benefits of welcoming foreign researchers have emerged. John Marburger, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, spoke before the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in early April, and defended a proposed system called IPASS (Interagency Panel on Advanced Science and Security), which would collect systematic input from expert scientists in order to enable consular officials to regain some control over the visa approval process. But the details of IPASS remain unclear, and, Marburger admitted, its implementation has been slowed by wrangling over the division of oversight between the various immigration divisions within the Department of Homeland Security.

In the meantime, delayed visa applicants continue to wait. Yuhong Jiang started her own internet user-group for checkees in December, called the 201(g) Club after the MANTIS provision that delays Chinese students. She hosts 350 stranded students on her message board, who arrange get-togethers in Shanghai and Beijing and busily trade tips on dealing with the consular bureaucracy. Still, as more celebratory announcements appear and her sister Xiaomei continues to wait, Yuhong is beginning to lose hope. "The longer this case goes, the more suspicious my sister looks, even though she's just a normal student," Yuhong says. "Officials still say that most cases are resolved in a month, so people who don't know the case ask what she did wrong to make it last so long."

The sudden appearance of SARS (sudden acute respiratory syndrome) and the concerns it raises for immigration and border control agencies has added a new component of uncertainty to Xiaomei's plight. Yuhong has asked her sister's advisors to write to the State Department and to the FBI, with no effect. "They seem unbreakable," she sighs. "I suspect there may be a deep philosophy underlying these policies-you can criticize the people carrying them out, but it comes from somewhere higher up, from people are willing to sacrifice scientific advancement for the sake of national security."

Back to 2003 Index