Point of No Return

uring his first three semesters at Louisiana State University, Nan Jiang had seen a fellow Chinese graduate student in the biochemistry department leave the country and not be allowed to return for seven months while she waited for a new visa. But Jiang then heard that things were better, that those delays weren't happening anymore. Besides, he's an only child, and after not seeing his parents for a year and a half, filial duty called. More than three months later, the 23-year-old is stuck in Beijing.

Such holdups are widespread, according to the General Accounting Office, which reported in February that foreign students and scholars in the sciences face long delays for U.S. visas because of a background check called Visas Mantis. The report found an average wait of 67 days, but the delays were unpredictable and varied widely. One case had been pending for 240 days.

It's no consolation to Jiang, but what he had heard about the visa process was true-delays like his are becoming rarer. The GAO looked at cases between April and June 2003, and the State Department has since made efforts to improve the clearance process.

In March, Janice Jacobs, State's deputy assistant secretary for Visa Services, received confirmation that the department's efforts were paying off. After weeks of seeing one newspaper after another pick up on the delays reported by the GAO, Jacobs got a cable from the embassy in Beijing that said 80 percent of the post's Mantis cases were being resolved in three weeks or less-a significant improvement over the GAO findings. "We are doing much, much better," Jacobs says.

Yet stories like Jiang's are all too familiar in the higher education and scientific communities. "Almost every campus has an example of someone who left to bury a parent or something and got stuck for 10 months," says Kevin Casey, director of federal relations for Harvard University.

Universities and scientific organizations worry that visa delays create the impression that foreign students aren't welcome in the United States, and that many who are stuck in visa purgatory feel they're being unfairly singled out as potential terrorists. "So often, there are delays that really are not necessary," says Barry Toiv, a spokesman for the Association of American Universities. "People for whom there's no reason to be kept out end up in unconscionable delays."

Farideh Jalilehvand, an Iranian chemist who teaches at the University of Calgary, hasn't been able to enter the United States to conduct research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where she once worked; she first applied for a visa in October 2002 and has since reapplied several times. Jalilehvand believes she's being kept out of the country because the United States unfairly blames Iran for the Sept. 11 hijackings.

The visa delays are indeed related to the attacks, but the connection is far less direct. Most scientists who encounter visa snags are victims of a system that lacked adequate staffing, training and technology to function under the pressures of new security demands following Sept. 11. "In my conversations with people, they say, 'Have you caught any terrorists through the Visas Mantis program?'" Jacobs says. "But it isn't for checking for terrorists."

The Visas Mantis program was established in 1998 to prevent the illegal export of sensitive technologies. From 1998 until 2002, the State Department processed a small number of Mantis cases. In 2000, the department ran about 1,000 checks.

Consular officers at posts checked visa applicants' fields of scientific expertise against the Technology Alert List, developed by the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation. If a consular official determined an applicant would encounter a technology on the list, the post cabled State Department headquarters, the FBI and the CIA. If the post didn't hear back from Washington within a certain number of days, the visa was granted.

But the alert list had been growing steadily, making it more difficult for officers to discern which scientific fields were cause for alarm. After Sept. 11, consular officials referred many more cases for Mantis checks. When in doubt, they were instructed, send the application to Washington.

"If you're a young foreign-service officer hoping for a long and successful career, you're always in doubt," says Victor Johnson, associate executive director for public policy of the Association of International Educators. The number of Mantis checks soared to 14,000 in 2002 and topped 20,000 last year.

Compounding the problem, a program called Visas Condor started in January 2002. These checks were designed to catch would-be terrorists. In the program's first two years, the State Department ran about 125,000 Condor checks. The department soon realized the agencies conducting checks couldn't meet deadlines. Posts were instructed to wait for an affirmative response from State before issuing visas.

That's when the Mantis program began to crack. Cables that weren't formatted correctly-a missing space or an extra dot-never arrived in Washington. The computers at State couldn't communicate with those at the FBI, so the agencies sent computer disks back and forth by courier-another opportunity for formatting errors. The FBI took a long time to clear some applications, especially those for names similar to those in the bureau's records-a common problem with applications from Asia.

Jacobs now has a five-person team working exclusively on coordinating Mantis checks. She has beefed up communication with posts, giving officers more training and more feedback on which cases need clearance from Washington. And State is spending $1 million to enable posts and clearing agencies to have access to its database, making cables and disks unnecessary.

The most helpful changes didn't require additional resources. Posts were instructed to give students and scholars priority for visa interviews, and agencies were asked to expedite checks on Mantis applications. Mantis clearances are now valid for one year-previously a check had to be done for each visa. Mantis is better, educators say, though its clearances should last even longer.

Jacobs isn't the only one who sees improvement. "In the last year and a half, they have-with limited resources-found ways to improve the system," says Lois Peterson, assistant director of the Board on International Scientific Organizations at the National Academies.

But Jiang and others like him remain locked in academic exile without an explanation. Only a small percentage of the millions of visas issued each year are subject to Mantis checks, and only a portion of those are delayed. Still, the possibility of such delays and the impossibility of predicting which applications might get stuck in the system encourage students and scholars to enroll in non-U.S. schools and attend conferences elsewhere. Meanwhile, "I am waiting at home all day for the possible call from the embassy," Jiang writes in an e-mail. "I am also trying to find out how to know what is happening."

THE BIG THREE

The General Accounting Office studied 3,000 background checks on science students and scholars and found that more than half came from China. Russia and India also sent large numbers to the United States.

Source: GAO

Number of Mantis checks The number of visa applications vetted by the Mantis system shot up over four years, putting pressure on limited resources and causing long delays in approvals.

Source: State Department