The Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) is looked down upon by much of the agent corps in ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which styles itself as "the largest investigative arm in the Department of Homeland Security". That's because SEVP is an administrative unit, charged with overseeing the approval of schools that accept foreign students, and monitoring those students and foreign exchange visitors for compliance with the conditions of their admission — violators are referred to the investigative arms of ICE for any enforcement action to be taken. The backbone of SEVP is the automated system used to conduct its mission: the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).
Despite its number-crunching and bureaucratic nature, I'm fond of the program, perhaps because I'm a dinosaur: I remember very well the days when there was no student monitoring program, nor any electronic system to aid in the monitoring. Everything was done with paper generated in endless, hopelessly outdated lists emanating from what was then the Central Office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). When the Iranian revolution resulted in the taking of our embassy and diplomats in 1979, I was one of the INS agents who tracked down Iranian students in this country using those lists, as ordered by a presidential directive.
That experience wasn't my first (nor was it by any means my last) task to enforce immigration laws against alien students and the schools authorized to accept them. I remember all too clearly the false starts at establishing control mechanisms; and the serial, inept attempts to create a meaningful computer system to track foreign students and exchange visitors. The government now has all the things we in INS lacked to do our jobs: a permanent oversight unit and a comprehensive, web-based electronic system allowing designated school officials to directly enter data in a manner that reasonably ensures timeliness and accuracy and availability to government officers.
Recently, SEVP issued its "General Summary Quarterly Review", containing a number of interesting factoids, and at the same time announced new SEVIS features, such as an interactive map of the United States that regularly updates, and graphically shows, the data contained in its periodic summaries. It's a great tool that demographers, school officials, analysts, and others can use to view the cities where "active" foreign students are located, broken down by numbers and geographical regions and nationalities.
Here's the problem with all that whiz-bang stuff: neither SEVP nor SEVIS was created for, nor should their focus be, slick new tools for the public.
The program's mission and the system's purpose are to aid in control of foreign students and exchange visitors, who have always posed a consistent threat to the country, as evidenced by their repeated involvement in terrorism and national security matters — a threat that's been noted often and serially by several FBI directors in congressional testimony. This is not a numbers problem per se, so much as a needle-in-the haystack problem. It doesn't take many terrorists to perpetrate mass murder. Of course, the larger the haystack, the harder it is to find the needles.
During the entire duration of my nearly 30 years in government service, INS agents nationwide numbered at their largest approximately 1,200 and most of the time, more like 550 agents. Yet we spent substantial amounts of our productive time on policing foreign students and exchange visitors.
Currently, there are about 6,000 agents in the investigative division of ICE, which is primarily responsible for such student and exchange visitor enforcement. There are probably close to the same number of agents in Enforcement and Removals, the other major division of ICE. Yet as a percentage of agents' productive time, nonimmigrant enforcement can be counted in the single digits, even though nonimmigrants who overstay or violate status make up nearly half of the population of aliens illegally in the United States (and keep in mind that this single-digit percentage is for all nonimmigrants — policing of nonimmigrant students constitutes only a fraction of that fraction; in other words, it's negligible).
This is troubling in the extreme, especially given the factoids that SEVP has provided us in its quarterly summary. There are more foreign students and exchange visitors than ever: nearly 1.25 million.
Think they're mostly going to big universities like the University of California, or Harvard, or the like? Nope: 76 percent of them are attending very small schools with enrollments of 50 or fewer foreign students, leaving one to wonder why so many schools are being authorized by SEVP to accept foreign students given the difficulty that this represents to any meaningful monitoring and control efforts. Of course, that in turn is only a concern if one does in fact care about monitoring and control — something this administration has made clear is irrelevant from their point of view.
What it comes down to is this: Without applying them to legitimate enforcement efforts, such as intelligent and targeted monitoring of student violators, the clever new tools are really nothing more than the equivalent of a parlor trick intended to divert attention from the fundamental lack of enforcement in an area that has proven in the past to be risk-intensive to the public safety and national security.