LONDON: In September 2000 the US consulate in Saudi Arabia issued a visa to Hani Hanjour, a young man who had been offered a place at a small language school in California.

By the time Hanjour entered the US, the class had already begun, but he made no attempt to enrol in it. Instead, he shuttled around the country, methodically preparing for the operation that would require him, almost a year later, to steer an American Airlines jet into the Pentagon.

Hanjour was the only September 11 hijacker to enter America with a student visa — the others pretended to be tourists or businessmen. But as it transpired that he and other terrorists had learnt to fly passenger aircraft in the US, politicians began to insist that something must be done about foreign students, and a traumatised nation signalled its assent.

A new Border Security Act, which recently cleared the US Senate in a landslide 97-0 vote, will change the way in which America’s 550,000 overseas students are treated.

To begin with, the government will step up its surveillance of foreign students. Visas will incorporate personal markers such as fingerprints. A computer tracking system, funded by a new tax on the students themselves, will be introduced. And it will become more difficult to transfer from a tourist visa to a student visa - an obvious nod to a manoeuvre attempted by two other hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi and Mohammed Atta.

But the real burden of keeping track of foreign students will fall on universities. If students drop out of full-time study, or fail to turn up in class within a month of the deadline for course registration, colleges must report them to the immigration service. Failure to do so will cost them the right to enrol foreign students in future.

To enforce the Border Security Act, the US government is depending on people like Peter Briggs, of Michigan State University. As director of the office for international students and scholars, Briggs has the unenviable task of reporting remiss students to the government.

Briggs is philosophical about the new climate for foreign students. “There’s a public perception that border security outweighs the benefits of international education,” he says. “That’s the larger context we’re working in.” But Briggs is less than enthusiastic about his new role as policeman. He can imagine the dilemmas that university officials will soon face. “Do I really want to report a brilliant student who is doing their dissertation research, but fails to turn in a certain form?” he asks. “I don’t long in my heart to report people to the Immigration and Naturalisation Service.”

Michigan State currently has around 3,700 foreign students and scholars. Many come from developing countries and are drawn to the university’s courses in agricultural technology. Briggs is concerned that zealous US border officers may turn away such students in future. “It’s conceivable that somebody will overreact to avoid being the famous person who gave a visa to Mohammad Atta.”

Even students who want to return home for the holidays worry — with some cause — that they may be unable to return. “They are saying, ‘look, I’m halfway through a PhD. What do I need to do to see my parents and come back again?”’ Briggs says.

The border security act will affect all foreign students in the US, but some more than others. The act makes it virtually impossible to issue visas to people from countries formally labelled sponsors of international terrorism. At the moment seven countries are thus designated: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, North Korea and Cuba. Last year, American universities enrolled close to 4,000 students from these countries.

So what about a student from, say, Iran who is already studying in the US? “The ones that are here are held hostage,” Briggs explains. “They can’t go home. If their parents were deathly ill and they came to me, I’d have to be realistic with them.”

Science and engineering departments face perhaps the most serious threat. Arunan Nadarajah, graduate director of the University of Toledo’s chemical engineering department, says that his field depends almost entirely on foreign students. “It’s almost impossible for engineering departments in smaller universities to recruit postgraduate students from the US,” he explains. “We are heavily reliant on brainpower coming in from elsewhere. That’s why we’re nervous.”

The new climate has already affected some in Nadarajah’s department. He cites one Pakistani student who went home to find a note from the FBI pinned to his door. Nadarajah also fears for the future of two brothers from Syria, “outstanding students. I would hate to lose them.”

Nadarajah suspects that if prospective students are refused US visas, they will simply go elsewhere. “The last thing we want is to lose out to you Europeans,” he says.

Science and engineering departments would also be strongly affected by any move to prevent overseas students from studying in certain fields. There is a real possibility that this will happen. A presidential directive issued last October suggested foreigners should be kept away from certain “sensitive” subjects that have a potential military application. If such restrictions are enforced, university teachers could be required to screen students. At Michigan State, Peter Briggs finds this absurd. “Are they really going to tell a biology professor to kick someone out because they’re studying something that appears to be threatening?” he asks. “There’s a challenge to academic freedom here.”

Americans would, of course, tolerate just about any measures that could prevent another terrorist attack on the scale of September 11. But educators are divided on whether the new laws will be effective.

Vic Johnson, an official at the Association of International Educators, believes that the border security act strikes a compromise between academic freedom and national security. But he claims that US interests would be better served by encouraging more foreign students to study in the US. “Foreign students are a net national security asset for the US,” he says. “No other country has the same opportunity to develop ties with people who are going to be leaders in their own societies. Everybody understood that on September 10. On September 11 they forgot it because they were afraid.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.