Blatant, widespread fraud has become a central part of America’s foreign student program, and the government agencies responsible for putting an end to it have been asleep at the wheel for far too long. This despite the fact that the 9/11 Commission report 20 years ago highlighted “the need for attention to America’s porous borders and the weak enforcement of immigration laws”, including “imposing tighter controls on student visas”.
The latest example involves a foreign student who lied his way into the United States and also obtained a full-ride scholarship by lying to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. None of the fraud was uncovered by the U.S. government, and it wasn’t until the Indian national admitted to committing extensive fraud on a lengthy post on the Reddit online forum, and was subsequently reported by a Reddit moderator to Lehigh University, that the fraud came to an end. He is now in ICE custody and faces deportation.
On a Reddit forum, a foreign student from India named Aryan Anand wrote a post titled, “I have built my life and career on lies”, and screen caps of the post are in the Appendix at the end of this report. As a freshman at Lehigh University, Anand explained that he hasn’t “seriously studied for even 2 hours” since being a high school sophomore in India, “barely passed” his junior year, is “not able to understand anything in physics, chemistry” and only able to understand math “a little”. Knowing that he didn’t have the necessary academic record to get into a quality American school, Anand planned “a very, very structured fraud plan” that would result in admission to a school that would provide full financial aid. If he hadn’t admitted to his fraud on Reddit, it’s likely Anand would still be living his life of lies in the United States.
The case represents a clear need for reform in the foreign student program. If a high school graduate with really bad grades can successfully game all parts of our foreign student program without any of it being detected by the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, or a well-known university, it’s a strong indicator that the entire foreign student program needs serious changes. Our nation’s foreign student program cannot be dependent on Reddit moderators flagging fraud. While it may be a good example of success for DHS’s “See Something, Say Something” campaign, this isn’t a matter of a suspicious-looking backpack on public transit — it’s wholesale fraud perpetrated against multiple parts of the federal government that went entirely undetected.
The Scam
Fake educational documents and records easily made it past the State Department, HSI’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), and Lehigh University without arousing any suspicion — amounting to a complete disaster for every part of the foreign student program. The ease with which this happened raises questions about the pervasiveness of such misrepresentation, and whether the U.S. government has the capacity to manage such a massive number of foreign students. In fact, there’s a strong case to be made that the government does not have the resources to manage the current population of 1,503,649 foreign students and the 7,417 schools that DHS has certified to enroll them. The number of foreign students and certified schools has exploded over the past two decades without a commensurate increase in resources for ICE, which is ultimately tasked with keeping tabs on everyone and making arrests when violations occur. The result is runaway fraud and an ever-increasing threat to national security that DHS has barely begun to recognize.
If a high school graduate with really bad grades can successfully game all parts of our foreign student program without any of it being detected, it’s a strong indicator that the entire foreign student program needs serious changes.
Anand began his scam by creating fake transcripts, showing good grades, and “even bought a fake stamp and seal” of his high school’s principal “to make it look perfect”. Since the transcripts would need to be sent to Lehigh University by the school’s official e-mail account, Anand bought a website domain and e-mail address to make it appear as if the communications were coming from his school. Interestingly, Anand noted that his actual school uses only a “gmail.com” e-mail address and that his fake account looked more authentic since it used his school’s actual name rather than a Google e-mail account.
From this account, Anand sent Lehigh University a fake profile that included essays he had the artificial intelligence (AI) program ChatGPT write for him. He noted that if the university wanted to verify anything, they would presumably respond to his e-mail and he would, of course, pose as an official from his high school and “verify” the information.
Anand also tricked Lehigh into giving him a full-ride scholarship to cover his tuition. He applied to many different schools that “promised to meet the need of every admitted student” and told the schools he couldn’t contribute anything, “like not even a single penny” but realized he needed to provide proof of his parents’ income. Lehigh offered him a financial aid package that “covered almost everything” except his meal plan cost, which was about $5,000 a year. Even though he knew he could afford this, he “planned another very wrong and fraud thing” which was creating a fake death certificate for his father. He sent it to Lehigh, explained that his father got cancer and died and that his mother would be receiving a pension that would be about half of his father’s income. Anand explains that Lehigh “instantly increased my aid package to cover full cost of attendance, which means tuition, housing, meals, and even one round trip ticket to India every year”.
Though Lehigh admitted him, Anand still had to obtain a visa to enter the United States. He was concerned about the interview, but the State Department welcomed him in after hearing that Lehigh gave him a full ride, which was noted on the financials section of his Form I-120, an admission form required of all students. Anand explained that the State Department official said, “Oh, that’s good. You must be very smart,” and instantly approved the visa without asking any further questions.
Anand also noted that the Indian exams, or boards, he had to take and submit to Lehigh are apparently questionable. The man who said he “barely passed” his junior year and is “not able to understand anything in physics, chemistry” and only able to understand math “a little” was “literally shocked” to see that the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) — which is run by the government of India — passed him with a score of 45 to 50 in every subject despite the fact that he had scores of 10 to 15 in each subject. He explained that the CBSE “tries to pass you in every way possible” and that “the only way you can fail is if you haven’t written anything on the answer sheet.” Wikipedia notes that the CBSE has a practice “of ‘tweaking’ candidates’ marks to account for paper difficulties and variations” and “has been criticized in the past for inflating students’ marks”. Yet the United States accepts the exams of foreign countries without having any actual oversight.
After starting classes at Lehigh, Anand realized he “was just not interested in studying” and “again made a plan”. He noted that American schools take academic integrity and honesty seriously, “even more than Indian colleges” but explained that “cheating here is easy” — but “if you get caught, it’s over”. For all of his exams at Lehigh, Anand simply hid his exam paper in his jacket, left the exam hall, wrote up answers “using the internet”, and then mixed into the crowd of students at the end of the exam period and submitted it. The result was a near perfect GPA.
Finally, Anand decided the he wanted some income but understood that he was largely prohibited from working as a foreign student. He apparently wasn’t aware that the law does allow foreign students to work up to 20 hours a week for the school’s bookstore, cafeteria, or some other school-affiliated job. Instead, he obtained a paying internship at an insurance firm based in New York, by making a fake resume and editing his transcript to make it look like he was a third-year marketing student. It was remote work requiring sending e-mails and making phone calls, but he explained, “most of the time, I just clock in and watch movies … and I make around $1,500 a month”.
Anand committed all of this fraud entirely undetected. It didn’t come to an end until he admitted his wrongdoing in a Reddit post. Reddit boards are full of conversations on this case and similar cases, a central complaint being that the Indian educational boards are corrupt and unable or unwilling to stop fraud, and that the U.S. college system suffers from similar problems.
Though many different entities are responsible for preventing this type of fraud, three of them are analyzed below: ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, Lehigh University, and the State Department.
Homeland Security Investigations
In addition to immigration enforcement and criminal investigations, ICE oversees the foreign student program. Congress tasked Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the criminal investigation side of ICE, with running the most important post-9/11 tracking database, called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), which includes all information about foreign nationals traveling to the United States on F, M, and J visas (academic, vocational, and exchange visitor visas). This database is continuously updated by designated school officials and HSI’s foreign student division called the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). The intent is that this database, if properly-maintained, allows HSI to quickly identify national security threats (e.g., foreigners absconding and not actually showing up for class) and make arrests as needed.
An American school cannot enroll foreign students without first being certified by SEVP. School certification lasts two years and must be renewed. Schools are required to meet a number of standards, but the approval is quite liberal and the fee quite low. As one SEVP official noted to me years ago, ICE really isn’t in the business of determining whether a school is a good school, but rather, whether it’s a “bona fide” and legitimate school, as per SEVP regulations. The result is that many less-than-impressive campuses have been certified to enroll foreign students over the years, resulting in large numbers and an increased workload for ICE officials.
Since ICE is ultimately responsible for addressing any national security threats in this program, one would think that the agency would have a plan to assist schools and the State Department with preventing fraud.
There’s no actual definition of what it means to be a “bona fide” school, according to SEVP officials, but the regulation requires that a school is “an established institution of learning or other recognized place of study” and possesses “the necessary facilities, personnel, and finances to conduct instruction in recognized courses” and is, “in fact, engaged in instruction in those courses”.
Still, under the regulation, ICE’s SEVP has a clear role to play in deciding whether or not a certified school is upholding its requirements and can decertify a school for “any valid and substantive reason”. For schools, the main requirement is that the Designated School Officials (DSOs) maintain the SEVIS records of foreign students, which includes everything from field of study, attendance, and graduation date, to whether the student faces academic probation or a criminal conviction, for example. For foreign students, the regulation requires maintaining a full course of study, obtaining permission from the school before making any changes to the courseload, and following all rules relating to travel or employment, for example.
The fraud case at issue raises a number of questions about what SEVP should have known and whether SEVP is properly training schools to identify fraud, or providing them adequate resources on how to vet foreign students. As an HSI spokesperson explained to the Center for Immigration Studies, foreign students “apply directly to certified schools for admission” and that it is the school that “may consider the student’s eligibility for a Form I-20, which is required to initiate the visa process”. ICE also explains that SEVP “is not involved in academic enrollment or student visa issuance” and that “SEVP certifies schools so they can enroll foreign students and also monitors the schools and students for compliance issues.” In other words, SEVP is putting the focus on the schools and the State Department. But since ICE is ultimately responsible for addressing any national security threats in this program, one would think that the agency would have a plan to assist schools and the State Department with preventing fraud; ultimately, any problems created by a poorly run program are going to fall on HSI to address.
Since HSI is tasked with maintaining SEVIS, it’s in HSI’s interest to ensure that fraudulent information isn’t being recorded into the system by fraudulent students. HSI should assist universities in detecting phony foreign test scores and provide some assistance to schools in determining what foreign schools are legitimate, including assisting in identifying legitimate foreign school officials and their contact information. One possible start would be requiring universities to become familiar with information offered by an organization called World Education Services and the International Association of Universities, which provide guidance on how to obtain authentic international academic credentials. SEVP might also require certain best practices for schools wishing to be certified to enroll foreign students, like conducting a certain number of audits each year (e.g., Cornell tells foreign students that it “conducts audits to verify the authenticity of final transcripts for a random sampling of entering students”.) There’s no reason SEVP couldn’t standardize this process.
Another option might be requiring every foreign school wishing to send their students to the United States to have a designated representative that can be made available to U.S. universities and DHS. Each U.S. university is required to have a designated school official as part of receiving certification to enroll foreign students, so why not require the same of the sending schools? SEVP may not want to take on such a significant effort, but they may have to (or convince the Department of Education or some other part of the federal government to take it on) in order to prevent this type of fraud.
As to the employment Anand obtained, he was under the misimpression that there are “no restrictions” on foreign students taking paid internships. In fact, employment of foreign students is very limited under law. At first glance, it seemed likely that Lehigh assisted Anand in obtaining this employment through a controversial program called Curricular Practical Training (CPT), which allows foreign students to work while in school if it is “an integral part of an established curriculum”. HSI and SEVP run this program, which contains a significant amount of fraud. But I received an answer from ICE on this question and the agency told me that he “was not approved for practical training”.
Any CPT employment must be approved by the school and must be “offered by sponsoring employers through cooperative agreements with the school”. Lehigh would have had to prove that Anand’s academic record matched up with the type of employment he obtained. If this had been a case involving CPT, the school obviously didn’t look too closely at Anand’s phony resume and transcript he submitted to the employer; in fact, the CPT program is so messy that it doesn’t appear schools have any responsibilities to ensure their foreign students are submitting accurate materials to employers.
But according to ICE, Lehigh was not involved in this employment and Anand was somehow being paid by the New York firm. There’s no evidence of ID fraud in Anand’s Reddit post, no information about work authorization being fraudulently obtained. Under regulation, if a school is aware that a foreign student is “working without permission, they must report it through SEVIS”, which results in the student’s status being terminated.
SEVP needs to figure out what happened here, and come up with a way to make sure foreign students aren’t violating regulations on employment. Perhaps HSI should visit the employer and conduct a worksite audit as well. HSI also needs to figure out why Lehigh was unaware of its student working unlawfully and put practices into place that prevent it from happening again.
ICE tells the Center for Immigration Studies that Anand was arrested on April 30, 2024, by Lehigh University Police in Pennsylvania and charged with forgery, tampering, theft by deception, and theft of services. Anand pleaded guilty to forgery on June 12, 2024, and was ordered removed from the United States by an immigration judge on June 24, 2024.
This raises the question of how many foreign students HSI has arrested and removed over the past four years. Thousands of foreigners listed in the SEVIS database violate the terms of their admission every single year, but there hasn’t been a peep out of HSI regarding any work within the foreign student program. Sources tell me that HSI is actually doing some work here, but it’s hard to know how accurate that is since nothing has been said publicly. HSI should take this opportunity to make some announcements and hold a press conference on how they’re tackling the mass fraud within their foreign student program.
HSI should also issue a serious notification to every foreign student explaining that any fraud will result in deportation and criminal prosecution, where applicable. HSI should also require all schools to regularly remind foreign students of this, as a condition of the school maintaining certification.
The Biden administration’s political leadership at ICE should be asking SEVP to bring new ideas to every meeting for reducing fraud and immigration violations within their program. HSI should be arresting thousands of foreign students every year. Instead, ICE and HSI have remained almost entirely silent on foreign student fraud under the Biden administration and SEVP has made no apparent effort to tighten up its fraud-plagued program. The threat to the United States is incalculable.
Lehigh University
A kid with bad grades from India was able to defraud Lehigh University with ease, making one wonder how much more fraud a smarter foreign national might be able to commit right under the university’s nose. Lehigh officials obviously aren’t doing enough to prevent harm to their own institution, but the lax and insufficient oversight of foreign students represents a threat to the entire nation. This time it appears the culprit was in it for his own gain, but if the fraud were committed by a foreign national with a different intent, the damage could have been much more significant.
A kid with bad grades from India was able to defraud Lehigh University with ease, making one wonder how much more fraud a smarter foreign national might be able to commit right under the university’s nose.
The issues Lehigh had with vetting this student are likely the same for most universities, so HSI and SEVP should be considering a nationwide response to stop it from happening on other campuses. In effect, HSI is certifying schools to enroll foreign students without ensuring that the schools have the capacity to properly vet the foreign students. This is a serious national security threat that needs to be addressed by homeland security officials; HSI cannot allow SEVP to continue certifying schools without some serious changes to the program and heightened standards.
In sum, here are the main issues on the university side revealed by this case:
- Lehigh apparently doesn’t have an official list of contact information for the foreign schools from which foreign students are applying, so it didn’t detect that they were communicating with a student engaging in fraud, rather than an official from an Indian school.
- There are apparently no expectations expressed by DHS that Lehigh make any effort to verify contact information from foreign schools.
- Lehigh apparently doesn’t have the capacity to detect phony transcripts and doesn’t know what documents from a legitimate foreign high school are supposed to look like.
- Lehigh apparently doesn’t have the capacity to detect whether entrance essays are written by a foreign student or generated by an AI program.
- Lehigh apparently doesn’t have the capacity to figure out if a foreign student’s financials are accurate and is handing out full scholarships to fraudsters as a result.
- Lehigh doesn’t have the capacity to verify foreign death certificates sent to them by foreign students, which resulted in massive expenditures by the school, including free trips to and from India.
- Lehigh doesn’t have the capacity to prevent students from engaging in blatant exam fraud on their own campus.
- Lehigh doesn’t have the capacity to determine whether its foreign students are obtaining employment with use of phony documents.
If these issues are unique to Lehigh, then HSI should immediately decertify the university so that it can no longer enroll foreign students until it gets its act together. More likely, these issues are not unique to Lehigh and all American universities suffer from the same problems. If it’s a nationwide problem, HSI and SEVP need to develop standards every school is expected to meet as a condition of certification. Just letting this slide isn’t an option, as there are likely many more foreign students engaging in similar types of fraud. Congress tasked HSI with using their law enforcement, criminal, and fraud expertise in making sure the foreign student program doesn’t create a threat to national security.
One troubling thing that this fraud case has made clear is that Lehigh, and perhaps all American universities, have no way to verify whether or not a transcript sent from a foreign school is a legitimate transcript. Advocates of mass immigration argue that foreign students are the “best and brightest” but apparently U.S. officials have difficulty determining whether these students are who they claim to be.
If Lehigh is any guide, U.S. universities will accept any transcript from any intending foreign student though any random e-mail address without any actual verification whatsoever. Lehigh, like all American universities, has a role to play here and cannot be in the business of blindly assuming all e-mails they receive from foreign student applicants are legitimate.
On the other hand, if Lehigh ever decided to develop an appropriate vetting system, who should Lehigh reach out to for assistance? Do we expect all universities to become experts in evaluating the legitimacy of foreign high schools and foreign transcripts? Or should we expect the DHS or the Department of Education to play a role here?
This wouldn’t be an easy undertaking, as a casual review of foreign high school websites makes clear. Though it hasn’t been reported which Indian high school Anand attended, is anyone at Lehigh or DHS able to provide a thorough legitimacy check of, for example, Hazaribagh High? The school’s website has a “gmail.com” e-mail address ([email protected]) and its “About Us” page includes a computer-generated picture of a school building and an athletic track; a simple review of actual photos of the grounds and satellite images show no such track. (The school's name appears both with and without the final “h”.) So why does the main page of this high school — which claims it “has risen to become one of the prominent school in society” [sic] have a fake photo so prominently displayed? The website contains actual photos of empty classrooms and some of apparent students, so that’s something.
But then I clicked around some of the webpages on this alleged school’s partially-broken website. It should be noted that I chose this Hazaribagh school entirely at random from a list of prominent Indian schools via a list on Wikipedia. Amazingly, the “Academics” web page has only a table of schools — which is really a screencap of a different website called the Delhi Public School Society, seemingly the local school district — and additional text in red which reads “of fake / unauthorized / illegal schools operating u” stamped across the top. Anyone expecting academics to be discussed on the “Academics” webpage would naturally be immediately confused. But it gets more bizarre. Listed on the apparent “fake / unauthorized / illegal schools” list is Hazaribagh itself! What does this mean? How should an admissions team at a U.S. university interpret this information? Do any admissions staffers even dig this much into the schools allegedly attended by their foreign student applicants?
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If you dig deeper and manage to find the Delhi Public School Society website (from where the screencap originates), it turns out that the red text warning about fake schools is actually — in its original form — scrolling text that reads “Beware of fake / unauthorized / illegal schools operating under the name of Delhi Public Schools / DPS. For court order(s) click here.” In India it’s apparently understood that there are all sorts of phony schools claiming to be legitimate schools. That’s a serious problem for American universities thinking about enrolling Indian nationals. How many U.S. admissions boards are aware of illegitimate foreign schools? Who is keeping track of the phony foreign schools? Are any American universities receiving training from any part of the U.S. government on how to evaluate a foreign school’s legitimacy? Does HSI expect Lehigh University to be tracking this?
Clicking on the scrolling text to see the court orders doesn’t work. The apparently legitimate Indian public school website is largely broken, just like the websites of the schools it allegedly oversees.
As another example, the first school on the list, Dhaligaon, has only a broken WordPress blog for a website, despite describing itself as “a diamond among pebbles”. How is an American university official supposed to determine whether or not this is a legitimate school? Another example, Vapi, an apparent public school with students ranging from grade schoolers to high school freshmen has a computer generated image of a campus on its website, and under its “Campus at a Glance” web page you’ll find an entirely computer-generated video of the alleged school, complete with Western-looking virtual people walking around. How is an American university admissions board supposed to figure out which parts of this school are fake and which parts are real (if any)?
Other Indian schools listed on this site have broken websites, while some appear to have legitimate websites. But even of those that look legitimate, many have unofficial-looking “gmail.com” e-mail addresses, some haven’t been updated in years, and many are so messy-looking that people prone to ADHD sensory overload reactions might want to steer clear.
Why doesn’t Lehigh have a methodology for determining which e-mail addresses match up to which foreign schools? Does Lehigh have a process for determining whether a foreign school is legitimate? Does Lehigh have any system in place to determine whether the records, contact info, and other parts of a student’s application are consistent with the information contained in the applications of other students claiming to have attended the same high school? What plan does Lehigh have to make sure the blatant fraud perpetrated by Anand doesn’t occur again and again with other foreign student applicants? These are basic questions HSI should be asking Lehigh. And Lehigh should put together a request for assistance from HSI. My guess is that as blatant as the fraud in this case is, neither HSI nor Lehigh are developing a plan.
As to Lehigh’s own testing procedures, HSI should be asking whether Lehigh has any plans to change testing conditions to avoid fraud. Anand was able to sneak his exam out of every class without a problem. HSI should also ask if Lehigh has any plans to change their test review process to check for use of ChatGPT. Lehigh obviously doesn’t take its exams all that seriously, so why should DHS take Lehigh seriously? If Lehigh cannot provide HSI a plan to remedy all of the fraud they’ve facilitated, perhaps Lehigh should no longer be certified for any students, American or foreign.
I asked ICE whether Lehigh fully met its regulatory requirements regarding the Anand case. ICE responded that “Lehigh University fulfilled its reporting requirements and timely terminated the student’s record in SEVIS.” According to media reports, Lehigh first sent the information to its own university police department to conduct an investigation. I think there remains a question of how quickly Lehigh made SEVP aware there was a problem. The Washington Times sought a quote from Lehigh, but they didn’t respond.
DHS is permitted, by regulation, to end a school’s certification process for any valid and substantive reason, and perhaps in this case it should be ended on account of the school stupidly enrolling a fraudster that it apparently wouldn’t have ever caught if not for the fraudster’s admission on Reddit. The United States doesn’t need more fraudster foreign nationals within its borders, and Lehigh doesn’t have the capacity to determine a legitimate student from one engaged in fraud. Is it in the interest of the United States to have Lehigh University continue to play a role in our nation’s foreign student program, or does it make more sense for HSI to decertify the school so that it can no longer enroll foreign students?
As of Fall 2023, there are 1,036 foreign students at Lehigh University with 496 of them, or 48 percent of them, being from China. The second largest nationality in Lehigh’s foreign student population is Indian, with 84 students from that country. The third largest nationality is Iran, with 42 students. The numbers drop off quickly after that on account of around 90 nationalities being represented in the total population.
The State Department
Immigration cases usually involve multiple agencies and a solution to a problem often requires that the agencies work together. But unless there is clear direction from Congress or the administration, it’s rare for agencies to take initiative to work jointly. Instead, the usual response to cases like that of Anand’s is for each agency to point to other agencies, each assuming the other agency is largely responsible for whatever went wrong.
The usual response to cases like this one is for each agency to point to other agencies, each assuming the other agency is largely responsible for whatever went wrong.
In this case, ICE pointed out in a statement to the Center for Immigration Studies that foreign students “apply directly to certified schools for admission” and that “the school’s designated officials may consider the student’s eligibility for a Form I-20, which is required to initiate the visa process” and that the State Department “is responsible for the issuance of nonimmigrant student visas”. They point out that ICE is “is not involved in academic enrollment or student visa issuance”. This is all true, of course, but ICE does decide whether or not to certify a school to allow it to enroll foreign students in the first place and puts a number of conditions on that certification. ICE also is tasked with keeping track, and potentially arresting and removing, the foreign students the State Department has allowed in.
A successful multi-agency program requires that agencies not operate in a vacuum, and it will often require one agency to ask for certain changes to policies and practices within another agency. The key reason for DHS being created was so that multiple agencies could more quickly coordinate their activity. But not all agencies that touch on immigration are contained within DHS, and the State Department is a perfect example. One of the State Department’s main jobs is to properly vet foreign nationals seeking admission to the United States, probe whether they are truly seeking to enter for the reasons a visa might be issued, and denying entry where there is a likelihood of fraud or concern that the alien is an “intending immigrant” who will overstay their period of admission.
In the case of Anand, the State Department seems to take the position that DHS and the university approved the foreign transcripts, and therefore there shouldn’t be any effort by the State Department to verify the information contained in the I-120. As noted previously, the State Department employee was impressed with Anand’s full scholarship, not understanding it was the result of misrepresentation; that scholarship (the result of Lehigh not detecting fraud) was apparently instrumental in the State Department seeing no reason to question Anand’s intent. It’s fraud facilitating more fraud. Meanwhile, DHS and the university likely assume the State Department will uncover any fraud. In the end, none of the entities involved in Anand’s admission detected the wrongdoing.
The State Department already has a serious problem with being unable to detect whether or not a foreign national is going to take advantage of the generosity of the American people; it regularly authorizes the admission of hundreds of thousands of foreigners who overstay their visas. The State Department’s failure significantly increases illegal immigration and puts more work on ICE.
If a large share of visitors from a particular nation are overstaying visas or otherwise violating the terms of admission, then perhaps higher standards and better policies are in order. The DHS Entry/Exit Overstay report shows that for some visa categories and nationalities, the overstay rates are very high. For foreign students and exchange visitors, the total overstay rate is 4.09 percent for the F visa category, 9.14 percent for the M visa category, and 5.63 percent for the J visa category. In real numbers, this is equivalent to 55,023 individuals overstaying in 2022.
Some examples illustrate the problem. In 2022, the countries with the highest number of foreign students overstaying were China, with a total of 9,005 overstayers, and India, with a total of 5,037 overstayers. Since the total population of foreign students from these countries is so high, the overstay rate appears low, 2.80 percent and 3.73 percent, respectively.
The rates and total numbers vary by country. Take Burkina Faso, where over 46 percent of people given a foreign student/exchange visitor visa overstayed. In real numbers, that’s 226 people who successfully tricked the State Department into believing they would return home, as per visa requirements. The number may be small, but it means the State Department is failing nearly half the time they’re processing visas and conducting interviews of individuals from this country. As another example, the foreign students from the country of Tuvalu were particularly successful in tricking the State Department in 2022 when 100 percent of them remained in the United States; on the other hand, it was a total population of only two people.
Take a different visa category, like B visas (tourists/business), and the numbers are outrageous. In 2022 alone, a total of 504,636 foreigners on tourist/business visas overstayed. How can the United States ever get the illegal immigration problem under control with the State Department handing out visas to liars who have no plan to return home?
DHS seems to simply accept the fact that the State Department is going to welcome in future illegal aliens every day of the week. This makes ICE’s job of stopping illegal immigration very difficult. DHS should demand some better training and higher standards at the State Department in order to bring down overstay rates. In the meantime, DHS needs to reduce the work it gives the State Department by not certifying so many universities to enroll such large numbers of foreign students that the system obviously cannot handle.
Appendix
The images below are made up of screencaps of Anand’s Reddit post, as captured by Reddit users before the post was deleted. Though it is nearly copied here in full, a few lines were not properly captured. CIS will update this blog if any additional lines become available.
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