Hearing of the Research and Science Education Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee - Visas for Foreign Scholars and Students

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

REP. JERRY McNERNEY (D-CA): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank the committee members or the panel members for testifying today. You know, the -- the issue is a difficult one, and it's complicated by the sort of emotional issues surrounding the entire immigration debate, which taints every single aspect of that whether it should or not.

Mr. Fineberg, thank you for coming in today, Dr. Fineberg. In your testimony, you suggest that the U.S. should not necessarily interview every single applicant, but should use its resources on the applicants that actually pose some sort of a threat, do you have any specific objective criteria in mind when you say that, or you -- yeah, let's leave it at that.

DR. FINEBERG: Well, already we heard from Mr. Edson, I thought, a useful starting point for this, namely, those applicants who are repeating an application for the same type of visa as previously held, and who -- for whom we have already adequate buyer documentation, in this case, 10 fingerprints. Already, the department has placed into a category where it will not be necessary to re-interview.

I would submit that many of the categories we've been talking about in terms of scientific, scholarly, roles that people play would put them in a lower risk category. And my general purpose in making that comment, if I may just say, is that I believe that if we attempt to apply the same intensity of attention to all applicants, we will not be deploying our available resources to screen out the high risk applicants in an optimal way.

We would be better served in terms of our security interests, if we could concentrate where the risks are higher and allow more of the facilitation of visit for those where the risks are truly de minimis.

REP. McNERNEY: Although, what mechanisms are already in place to verify that the students and scientists are following the terms of their visa and are those mechanisms sufficient to give comfort to the DHS?

DR. FINEBERG: I can't answer that question from my own knowledge. So I'd -- I think, we probably would want to hear it from DHS about that, and maybe Mr. Edson has information that would be relevant to it.

MR. EDSON: Thank you, the primary chance of benefit to our consular officers in the field is the Student Exchange Visitor Information System, the consolidated online system for registering and tracking foreign students in the United States, because it doesn't enable the data's input primarily by the educational institutions, and enables our officers to verify that a student is in valid status at the time they apply for renewal.

In fact, I -- if -- this is speculative, but I believe that it's possible that that decrease in the refusal rates for students that I mentioned might be tied in large part to the SEVIS program that provides such good data and basically eliminated improperly completed I20s, the form that is required for a student visa or fraudulent I20s.

REP. McNERNEY: Well, to the extent that you can say today, how many documented incidents are there of foreign students or scholars entering this country, and then taking actions to harm us, or going home and taking actions to harm us. Are there any documentations or -- how many?

MR. EDSON: I don't have that data that would be a data from ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

REP. McNERNEY: Ms. Cotten, how have the visa delays and denials, affected the ability of your university to recruit the top scientists and engineers that you like to recruit?

MS. COTTEN: I can tell you that we would normally recruit first, because our people are going to international conferences, they are recruiting out of the graduate programs where we have a lot of international students coming to our own programs.

And the difficulty we have is once we've identified them, can they get here? And so I can't say that we have a 50 percent failure rate or an 80 percent failure or 20, but there are always those people that -- either can't come.

Every year, we have people who are identified to come to research projects, and for whatever reason, they cannot get their visa normally, it's a 214(b) nonimmigrant intent issue, or it takes so long that they just give up and everybody says, "Oh, this is too much trouble, I've got a grant, I have to go forward with the grant, I have to find somebody else to fill that slot."

So it's not numbers so much as it is identified individuals who are unique, who know just what they know and it's special, and we may not be able to get them. And if I could speak to your earlier question regarding how we're tracking or managing students when they're here, Mr. Edson mentioned the SEVIS system, and as an educational institution involved in the SEVIS system, we are required every semester to report on every international student that they are enrolled and moving forward in a full time program.

And for all of our scholars, the J1 scholars, we report when they arrive, and then we report specifically if we authorized them to give a lecture at another school, to do research at a local university or beyond. Any of those actions, it would normally be work actions or changes in their activities, we report as those occur, and we put that information into SEVIS.

REP. McNERNEY: So now the responsibility has fallen to the university?

(Nods yes)

REP. McNERNEY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

REP. McNERNEY: Thank you very much.

Again, this has been a very important hearing, and I think we need to continue this sort of discussion. I've -- having gone through the rigors of a Ph.D. program, I understand how important it is to have visiting scholars. They contribute in ways that go beyond what you're studying, and they open up doors for you to go overseas and so on and so forth.

So I want to make sure that we do open those up, and I think some prior discussions with Chairman Baird, there are some very specific recommendations that would be helpful, and that could turn into legislation, I hope to work with the chairman on that.

You've actually elaborated on those couple of things. And also we need to take into consideration our national security both in terms of whatever terrorist threat there may be, but with the economics and the globalization.

So we have a number of things to balance here, and this is the type of discussion that's going to help open up that type of thinking that allows us to move forward on a general basis with these sort of things. So thank you very much for your time and your work, and with that I'll -- I yield.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source