Policy Brief vol.1 issue.3

In the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 28, 2006), an opinion article by NAFSA Executive Director and CEO Marlene M. Johnson sets out the key challenges facing the United States in attracting the world's talent. In an era of global mobility and global competition, Johnson argues, the United States must pursue a proactive national strategy to ensure that our country can be a magnet for the world's best and brightest students, scholars, and workers.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated July 28, 2006

Toward a New Foreign-Student Strategy

By Marlene M. Johnson

In an April op-ed article in The Guardian, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain announced that he was personally setting a goal of attracting 100,000 more international students to Britain in the next five years. That would follow an increase of 118,000 since Blair announced his first international-student initiative in 1999. Titled "Why We're Putting Up Millions to Attract More Students From Overseas," the essay outlined a package of incentives designed to make the nation a more attractive destination for international students.

Blair's plan, not to mention his article's headline, would be hard to imagine in the United States today. We are only slowly awakening to the implications of a rapidly emerging global playing field, on which international students have myriad choices about where to pursue their education, with many countries aggressively working to attract them. We don't need to "put up millions" to compete effectively. We must, however, get our act together, beginning with a comparable commitment to attract international students — one that sets specific goals and articulates concrete operational policies to meet them.

Notwithstanding the high-level rhetoric that we hear almost daily about the importance of international students and scholars to our foreign policy, economy, and colleges, that commitment does not yet exist — and it shows. International-student enrollments in American colleges have been declining since 2002. Based on our current policies, we'll be lucky to get back to that year's level five years from now, while countries like Britain will be charging ahead at our expense.

The advantages that international students bring to our country are outlined in my association's just-released report, "Restoring U.S. Competitiveness for International Students and Scholars." The number of international students in the United States — and whether it is going up or down — matters because it is a surrogate for competitiveness. It is one of the measures we use to gauge whether the United States is succeeding in attracting talented people from around the world who, as innovators, will help us drive our economy and remain on the cutting edge, and, as tomorrow's world leaders, will help us shape the future.

By that indicator and others, we are not doing well. Our failure to remain attractive to international students is mirrored by our difficulties in maintaining a welcoming environment for the scientists, scholars, and researchers most sought after by the world's top learning centers. Why is that? And what needs to be done?

Most of the debate has focused on visa restrictions that our government put in place after September 11, 2001. To its credit, while obtaining a visa is still unnecessarily hard, the State Department has worked to recalibrate visa policy to lower the barriers to legitimate visitors while preserving the protections that the new controls sought to provide.

Yet the problem goes much further. The United States is losing out in the competition for the world's best and brightest students and scholars for three key reasons. First, we face increased competition from both our traditional competitor nations and those like India and China, major sending countries that are now seeking to provide more and better higher-education options for their own people. Second, we have failed to adjust not only our visa system, but also our immigration and export-control systems to the realities of that global competition. And third, we have failed to even recognize the need for, much less to carry out, a strategic plan to conduct that competition successfully.

Consider the following:

• While one part of the State Department works to resolve visa issues, another part publishes a proposed rule in April that would effectively end the ability of international undergraduate students to come to the United States for internships. Three weeks later, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, Karen P. Hughes, testifies before a Congressional subcommittee and calls international-exchange programs "perhaps our single most effective public-diplomacy tool over the last 50 years." Asked why, in view of that, State has published the intern rule, Ambassador Hughes has to admit she has never heard of it.
• The Commerce Department works to attract international students, organizing recruiting missions abroad and creating partnerships at the state level with American universities. At the same time, another part of the department publishes a notification of its intent (since withdrawn) to tighten restrictions on access to our technologies and research labs by foreign scholars and graduate students.
• The State Department begins an effort to combat negative impressions abroad of the visa system and to convince international students that they are welcome. At the same time, the Social Security Administration tightens international students' access to Social Security numbers. When reminded that it would be very difficult for international students to function in our society — to lease an apartment, open a bank account, arrange for utility services — without that pervasive identifier, the Social Security Administration's response is, essentially, "That's not our problem." Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers might be a substitute identifier, but the Internal Revenue Service has also tightened access to ITIN's, ruling that they are not available for nontax purposes. Meanwhile, Congress passes the "Real ID Act," endorsed by President Bush, which will make it much more difficult for an international student to acquire a driver's license, another essential identifier here.
• It is well known that the United States has more high-tech jobs than we have trained people to fill them. Industry and government leaders from President Bush on down cite that problem frequently and draw the obvious conclusion: We not only need to educate more American students in science and math, but we also must attract and welcome top current and future scientists from other countries who aspire to apply their skills here. Yet, under the law, the State Department may not grant a student visa to a science graduate student who cannot prove that he or she intends to go home — rather than seek employment in our high-tech industry — upon graduation. The same provision applies to all students at all levels, and the State Department lobbies hard to keep it in place.
• Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff announce a joint vision for making the United States more welcoming for foreign visitors while improving border security. Yet only a month later, the State Department causes an outcry when, following standard operating procedures, it refuses a visa to an internationally renowned Indian scientist, a frequent visitor to the United States who has been invited to speak at a scientific conference at the University of Florida, where he was previously a distinguished visiting professor.

 

That is the reality "on the ground," beneath all the rhetoric. We cannot be successful in the intense competition for international talent if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, if articulated policy is canceled out by bureaucratic actions, and if we do not bring our laws into conformity with our interests.

All that I've described does not result from anyone doing anything wrong, but rather from people acting in the sincere belief that they are serving the national interest. Such incidents happen in a policy vacuum, where there is no clear, authoritative articulation at the highest levels of where the national interest lies. In that situation, every proposal that seems by itself to "make us safer" prevails, and it is easy to end up over time with a series of discrete actions whose cumulative, long-term consequences are to undermine our national security by restricting our access to essential foreign talent and the international leaders of tomorrow.

It need not be this way. Our bureaucracy responds well to strong presidential leadership that sets a clear policy direction and requires results. The president must articulate a national strategy for restoring the status of the United States as a magnet for international students, scholars, and leading scientists. That strategy must set forth the roles of various government agencies and confront the many barriers and disincentives that stand in the way of students and scholars who want to study, conduct research, and attend professional meetings in this country.

A senior White House official should be in charge of carrying out that strategy and coordinating the government's efforts. The agencies whose responsibilities influence the propensity of international students and scholars to want to come to the United States, their ability to gain access to the country, and the quality of their sojourn here must all be given effective mandates to do their part to promote the president's articulated policy. Those agencies must include not only the Departments of State, Homeland Security, Commerce, and Education, but also the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and others. The designated White House official should hold the head of each agency accountable for ensuring that different bureaus are not working at cross-purposes. Each relevant federal agency should report to him or her on how it proposes to help carry out the overall strategy and should submit periodic reports on its progress.

We must recognize — not just in rhetoric but in operational detail — that in an age when talent is scarce, mobile, and widely dispersed in the world, our visa system should be as much a gateway for international talent as it is a barrier to international criminals. We must graduate our export controls into the global era by recognizing that we only hamper our scientific leadership by restricting leading international scientists from participating in unclassified, cutting-edge research in our labs.

And we must update an immigration regime that essentially predates the global age. The anachronistic requirement that all applicants for student visas must intend to return home after their studies makes no sense when our talent-starved high-tech industries actively recruit international students upon graduation. We must remove artificial caps on the number of skilled foreign workers who can acquire temporary employment visas and green cards. Immigration legislation recently passed by the Senate and awaiting conference with the House contains provisions in those areas that must be preserved.

We urgently need a national strategy that ensures that the United States can attract the best talent from overseas and continue to lead the world. The other teams on the new global playing field are good. We can compete with anyone, but without strong national leadership, we don't know the plays and aren't all headed toward the same goal. The time for complacency is past.

Marlene M. Johnson is executive director and CEO of Nafsa: Association of International Educators.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 47, Page B16

Policy Brief is a periodic electronic information resource for policy news and analysis on international education issues, published by NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

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