Sen. Carper: 'If I Were a Bad Guy...I Might Try Just Coming Over As a Student or As a Tourist'
(CNSNews.com) - It takes up to two years for refugees to go through the background checks that result in their resettlement in the United States, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) told the Homeland Security Committee on Thursday.
"If I were a bad guy trying to get in, that's the last place -- the last way I'd try to get in," he said. "If I were a bad guy trying to get in, I might try a visa waiver program...and I might try just coming over as a student or as a tourist."
Carper spoke on the same day that House Republicans (and some Democrats) passed a bill "pausing" the refugee resettlement program until stronger security measures can be put in place.
Democrats, meanwhile, turned their attention to vulnerabilities in the visa waiver program, which allows citizens of 38 participating countries to travel to the United States without a visa for stays of 90 days or less, if they have an electronic passport and are authorized to board a U.S.-bound carrier.
But what about the student visa program?
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) asked that question at Thursday's committee hearing: "Are we checking them (students) in all the databases?" she asked Leon Rodriguez, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
"We're certainly checking in the databases," Rodriguez responded. "We do that for just about every immigration category that we operate. The configurations are different, depending on the categories, but we basically do a national security check, a criminal justice check on just about every applicant for an immigration benefit or other sort of immigration consideration."
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is responsible for administering the Student Exchange and Visitor Program (SEVP), which monitors foreign students and exchange visitors -- and their dependents -- who enter the United States.
According to the latest data (July 2015) [1], there were 1,299,271 active students and exchange visitors and 152,553 of their dependents in the United States affiliated with any one of 8,887 schools.
ICE does not release information about how many students have overstayed their visas. (ABC News reported [2] in 2014 that 58,000 students had overstayed their visas in the past year, and 6,000 of them were "determined to be of heightened concern.")
China sends the most students to the U.S. (301,532), followed by India (149,987), South Korea (77,854), Saudi Arabia (76,496), Japan (24,717), and Vietnam (24,288).
In fact, 76 percent of all academic and vocational students originate from Asian nations, followed by 8 percent from Europe, 6 percent from North America, 5 percent from South America, 4 percent from Africa, and 1 percent from Australia/Pacific Islands.
Thirty-six percent of all students study in California, New York, and Texas.
ICE's Student Exchange and Visitor Program is a post-9/11 security program that registers U.S. schools to host foreign students and keep track of them while they are in the United States.
But an oversight report released by then-Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) in January 2015 found that the Department of Homeland Security was "not effectively managing this program by ensuring its participants follow the rules, creating significant vulnerabilities to national security and public safety."
The report noted that "people plotting terrorist attacks, including several of the 9/11 hijackers, were in the United States using student visas."
Schools that accept foreign students do not need to be accredited or licensed, but they are supposed to tell DHS about the courses students are taking and whether they actually show up for class.
But Coburn's report pointed to an "imbalance" between the program’s scope and the resources that are dedicated to overseeing it.
"According to ICE officials, the agency has dedicated approximately 200 ICE agents assigned to overseeing the SEVP program, which includes approximately 1.3 million visa holders and nearly 9,000 schools. This means that, if responsibilities for overseeing the program are distributed evenly, each ICE agent must try to monitor approximately 6,500 students."
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