INS looks to IT to revamp lax student visa system

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By Dan Verton

(IDG) -- The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is embarking upon a series of management and IT reforms designed to ensure that terrorists are unable to gain entry to the U.S. under false pretenses, INS Commissioner James Ziglar told a House subcommittee last week.

The issue of authorizing and monitoring foreign student visa recipients came to the forefront with the events of September 11 and again this month when student visa approval letters were issued for two of the 19 hijackers who took part in the attacks. In response, the INS has sped up plans to revamp its IT infrastructure, including creating the agency's first CIO position and moving from a paper-based student visa system to an automated, real-time Web-based database.

"When I started this job about seven months ago ... I found too much reliance on manual data entry, much of which had to be boxed and shipped to outside contractors," said Ziglar in written testimony submitted to Congress. "The student process had become so lax and lengthy because the focus of immigration policies prior to September 11 was not on security but on facilitating the students and the schools that they attended. The focus has changed, and our process has changed as well."

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That new process will take off in July, when the INS will complete testing on a pilot project that will form the basis for a nationwide system capable of tracking foreign visitors and student visa holders. Known as the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), the system will use XML technology to link thousands of U.S. universities, educational institutions, port authorities and U.S. State Department consulates around the world to a centralized database at INS headquarters in Washington, said INS spokeswoman Eyleen Schmidt.

Congressional passage of the U.S. Patriot Act last October provided the INS with $33 million to deploy SEVIS, which has been in beta testing at dozens of schools in Atlanta, Boston and North Carolina, said Schmidt. In addition, the law now requires the INS to have the system fully operational by next year.

The centerpiece of SEVIS will be a centralized, Web-enabled database that will be able to track bar-coded I-20 forms -- the forms issued to foreign students by schools to prove their enrollment. The new digital process will "link documents to individual students and cut down on fraud," said Schmidt. Schools will be able to enter I-20 forms into the system individually or in batch mode.

However, some schools say the data integration challenge could be daunting and costly for them.

"Our database is fairly antiquated, and the data cannot be captured in the current database," said Cynthia Tasaki, assistant director of international programs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

"It's going to cost us a lot of money," Tasaki said, acknowledging that the new system will almost certainly improve the process of verifying foreign student enrollments, which in the past could take up to nine months.

An industry source working with the INS on various IT projects said connecting all of the databases in the next two years will be a "very big challenge," but not impossible.