Being An International Student in a Post 9/11 World :: Terrorism Terrorists Essays

Being An International Student in a Post 9/11 World "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free," just not your students. "I knew what was going to happen after 9/11. It was understood," said Tariq Halela, a 21-year-old student at Boston University. What he understood was simple: for an international student, living in the United States would never be the same. Halela, an Indian born Kuwaiti native, has been studying stateside for over two years. He is an accounting major and speaks four languages -- English, Arabic, Hindi and Gujarati -- fluently. "I love it here in the states," he said. "That is why I was so worried when I got a call from the ISO [international student's office] saying I could be deported." Confusion over the new immigration rules and regulations is what gave Halela his first deportation scare. With stricter visas guidelines, the culmination of new policies the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have undertaken is the Student Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS. Now, new international students can choose to study at any one of the over 7,000 SEVIS-certified universities in America. The schools, in turn, provide a plethora of information on the students ranging from the mundane - name, enrollment verification, date of birth - to the normally considered private information such as grades and field of study. Essentially, the SEVIS is a program designed to keep tabs on all the approximately one million international students studying here in the U.S. The SEVIS keeps a database housing all of a student's information to determine whether he or she can stay in the U.S. or can be allowed to come here in the first place. Although the program seems like a reaction to the 9/11 attacks, the birth of SEVIS dates back to the early '90s. One of the men convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Eyad Ismoil, had gained access to the U.S. through a student visa. In an attempt to help regulate the student visas system, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which commissioned the government to create a system that manages information on all international students but Congress never pressed to make that system operational. When it was learned that two of the 9/11 highjackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehi, also came tot he U.S. through student visas, Congress changed their tune.