Sanctuary colleges exploit student loopholes, easy targets for Trump

College administrators across the country have reacted to the prospects of actual, genuine immigration enforcement by announcing sanctuary policies that would “protect” illegal alien students from the equal enforcement of our immigration laws.

The colleges are vowing to resist and refuse all immigration status inquiries from the Trump Homeland Security department. In response, legislators at the state and federal level have introduced a slew of bills seeking to reprimand “sanctuary schools” by pulling government grants.

{mosads}While such measures will no doubt encourage some schools to cooperate with the new administration, the bills have been silent about a direct financial sanction that’s perhaps just as big.

Section 641 of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) requires DHS to monitor and verify the visa information of all foreign students enrolled at the thousands of U.S. universities approved to participate in student visa programs.

The provision was designed to ensure that students comply with visa-conditions and was enacted in the late 1990s in response to several deadly attacks committed by terrorists using the visas to enter the U.S. (1993’s World Trade Center bombing being an example).

A northeast Arkansas lawmaker files bill that would punish state colleges if they become “sanctuary campuses”>>https://t.co/h8wwBT9HRY pic.twitter.com/7ZMOv46bF0

— Region 8 News (@Region8News) January 13, 2017

To monitor foreign students, IIRIRA established the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) where college administrators must report online foreign student visa data.

Currently, however, illegal aliens enrolled at DHS-certified institutions are not covered by the foreign student reporting law.

President Trump should issue an executive order rescinding this loophole stating that SEVIS reporting applies to any alien who enrolls at a higher education institution that would require a student visa, but who fails to do so. Without a doubt, DHS has the discretion to require DHS-certified schools to report on aliens who are admitted without complying with the visa requirements for foreign students.

Congress could also amend the INA. An amendment would give DHS and colleges more flexibility in applying the law to illegal aliens without adding extra administrative burdens on the law-abiding scholars we have always welcomed from abroad.

As every higher education administrator knows, foreign students are increasingly viewed as university “profit centers.” On top of the full tuition paid by the foreign students, they also provide schools with a huge supply of cheap assistants and other forms of researcher-labor — to the loss of American students, critics have found.

NEW: Universities face pressure to declare campuses as sanctuaries against deportation https://t.co/bBpjxuFZr5 pic.twitter.com/ehGfZbNU6A

— The Hill (@thehill) November 15, 2016

So lucrative are foreign students for universities, a few years back the California State University system decided to reconcile a budget shortfall by shifting spots reserved for California students over to full-tuition-paying foreigners. Those colleges that wish to obstruct the federal government should not be able to profit from it at the same time.

Ensuring compliance by U.S. colleges with a reformed SEVIS reporting requirement would have a more direct effect on illegal immigration and national security than rescinding grants across the board. DHS should announce that colleges obstructing the new SEVIS reporting requirement would lose their eligibility to issue I-20 forms. This would be big.

Without I-20 authority, schools cannot begin the visa application process on behalf of foreign students, and won’t be able to enroll them as a consequence.

The attitude among school officials has deteriorated since the student visa program was created in 1952. Foreign student visas were originally intended as a way to promote American values abroad by exposing foreign students to our culture and academic institutions after which time they’d return to their home countries.

Now, not only has the program become a giant university-subsidy, with half-a-million foreign students currently in the country, fewer and fewer of the students are actually going back.

Instead, they’re using their visas to anchor themselves here, locate work (usually in the tech fields), and permanently settle.

And due to programs like the Optional Practical Training program (an unlawful program which we’re currently challenging in court), many of the students are able to work here during their studies and even after they obtain their degrees, thereby putting considerable pressure on American white-collar wages — almost half of all foreign grad students work here following graduation.

Big Business obviously loves this. They pick foreign students and graduates over our own not just because they work below U.S. wage-rates (still far above their own), but to take advantage of U.S. laws that exempt employed foreign students from Social Security and Medicare taxes (a fact which we’ve claimed facilitates discrimination against American job applicants). 

DHS could also direct increased auditing of these colleges’ SEVIS compliance (which for years has generally been problematic anyway). After all, colleges that openly refuse compliance with federal agencies in one area have a higher probability of not complying in others.

College officials “justify” non-cooperation with immigration authorities on the ground that they shouldn’t have to be deputized as federal agents — Sanctuary cities use the same argument.

It’s actually an old talking point from colleges. When DHS mandated that schools collect a $100 fee from students to pay for SEVIS, they complained it wasn’t an ‘appropriate activity’ for schools — DHS relented and began collecting the fees. And on actual SEVIS reporting, they similarly complained about it being too burdensome.

Although the attacks on 9/11, which involved a student visa-holder, should have silenced their calls to repeal the registration provision, complaints about the reporting requirements regrettably continue.

Ian Smith is an investigative associate at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration. Michael Hethmon is the senior counsel for IRLI.