Would you let absolutely anyone in your house, with no conditions? Of course not. If even an invited guest got rowdy, trashed your kitchen, took over your bathroom, insulted your religion, or invited their friends to set up tents on your lawn, you’d send them packing.
By the same token, no nation should be forced to admit people who hate that country and its values. Visas are a privilege, not a right.
Furthermore, foreigners visiting, studying, or working here have fewer rights and more limited ‘due process’ than citizens – as they should. The rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship should be held to a much higher standard, not watered down and ‘given’ to those with lesser immigration status or skin in the game.
I was a U.S. Foreign Service officer from 1999-2022, and my first tour was to our Embassy in New Delhi, India. We officers on the “visa line” did around 150 interviews a day to determine whether Indian applicants were qualified to come to the U.S. We used a two-page paper form that had little information, which we checked against a criminal and terrorist records database that was not as comprehensive as today’s. If the communications systems went down, we had to rely on CDs that were weeks old to check the names.
All the September 11, 2001, hijackers were in the United States on non-immigrant visas; mostly tourist/visitor visas, although there was at least one holding a student visa. The world became a lot riskier, and the U.S. needed to adapt the way we admitted foreigners.
The massive 9/11 Commission Report detailed inefficiencies and loopholes in the way U.S. intelligence and national security agencies worked with the Department of State to check the names, dates of birth and other personal information of applicants before issuing them visas.
CHINESE STUDENT ARRESTED FOR ALLEGEDLY SMUGGLING UNDECLARED BIOLOGICAL MATERIALS SEEN IN NEW MUGSHOT
In response, the State Department added forms and took more information from each applicant, so we knew as much as possible about who wanted to come to our country and why. State also improved the way that information was shared and vetted by the rest of the U.S. government so that everything we collectively knew about any John Q. Foreigner was considered before we let him into the country.
The change in process slowed things at first, but then we adapted and increased efficiency. The entire application process is now done online, where entered data is combined with a photo and fingerprints for each person.
Today, everyone is online, particularly younger people. Every student applicant has a smartphone and most likely multiple social media accounts. What we post online reflects who we are. Anonymity is an illusion – one should not post things one is ashamed of or wants to hide.
As any consular officer will tell you, some people lie in visa interviews. We have something they want: a visa to get into the United States. They might not lie to their mother or priest, but lying to a foreign official is a far lesser sin.
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Given that reality, and the wealth of information available online that truly reflects a person, consular officers would ideally be vetting all applicants’ social media already. Until now, the constraints of staffing – having an individual human access and look through each applicant’s many accounts and possibly thousands of posts – made that prohibitive except in cases deemed worthy of increased scrutiny. Consular units in U.S. embassies have fraud prevention units, but they are not staffed to handle every single case. Nor can every case be elevated for scrutiny by other U.S. agencies.
The growing capacity of AI could facilitate more efficient vetting. The U.S. has over a million foreign students here already and issues almost half a million more such visas every year. Weeding out a few who are more intent on rioting, protesting, or doing nefarious research than getting a degree will encourage the rest to respect our country and our rules.