This week the House Subcommittee on Immigration heard testimony from officials involved with the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). SEVIS is designed to track the whereabouts of approximately 500,000 foreign students studying at U.S. colleges and universities. The system was mandated by Congress in 1996 and rules for its implementation were rolled out after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Schools were required to use the system exclusively by February 15. Since that deadline, the system has been criticized for technology glitches such as sending student records to the wrong schools or losing previously entered information.

On Wednesday the committee heard from Johnny Williams, a top Homeland Security Department official. Williams is the interim director of immigration enforcement at Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which replaced part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He said that despite the glitches, SEVIS is fully deployed and working well.

Another official told the committee that SEVIS still lacks key components for it to be considered fully deployed. Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine gave the committee a list of recommendations to improve the system’s effectiveness. Among Fine’s proposals were the following:

• to appoint a foreign student program coordination manager to be accountable for immigration issues affecting foreign students
• to hire full-time staff to certify and monitor schools
• to monitor the timeliness and quality of work done by contract investigators, and to improve their on-site review checklist
• to coordinate with the Department of Education to conduct school audits
• to provide schools with training and certification
• to investigate cases of fraud identified by SEVIS and to ensure that there are sufficient investigation resources available

David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, voiced many of the complaints of foreign students and their advisors.

“I fear that we are, for a variety of reasons, making it more difficult for international students and scholars to come to our country and to complete their studies, scholarship and research. This is mostly because enormous and complicated efforts have been made in a very short period of time. The result is a complicated set of new regulations, rules and procedures that do not work very well at the present time. Eventually, they will work well, but the damage to our reputation as the destination of choice may be seriously undermined before that happens,” Ward testified.

Ward said he thought SEVIS was the most important part of the governments plan to monitor foreign students and said he supports its implementation, but he said he was concerned that the system was implemented before it was fully operational.

Ward listed what he called three serious problems with the SEVIS. He said that it is technologically flawed; that, contrary to promises, SEVIS does not provide real-time data access; and that the government has not provided adequate training. Ward also recommended that the Social Security Administration be given access to SEVIS, so that it could verify work authorization before issuing Social Security numbers, which would reduce the administrative burden on college and university staff.

The committee also heard from retired INS Atlanta District Director Thomas Fischer, who said that SEVIS in its current form is a “dumbed down” version of the CIPRIS program, and that it is not capable of effectively tracking and enforcing student visa policies. Fischer said SEVIS lacks several features that would enable the system to coordinate the tracking of student financial data, among other things.

Fischer was critical of the investigation process and urged the committee to stiffen penalties for institutions that do not comply with SEVIS policies.

“SEVIS… given the way it is configured, appears to be a “user friendly” database, with no serious or thorough means of ferreting out violators or trends, or cross checking with other pertinent governmental databases,” Fischer said.