School Certification
Floor Speech
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, on Thursday this country will commemorate the 13th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
We learned many lessons from that day. One key lesson was that terrorists can and will exploit our immigration system and policies to enter and remain in the United States and now and into the future potentially harm Americans.
The 9/11 attacks were carried out by 19 hijackers, some of whom entered on student visas and trained in flight schools in the United States. The 19 individuals applied for 23 visas. They lied on their applications. They failed to abide by the terms of their visas. This was a wake-up call that we needed better oversight of our visa programs, especially student visas. But this wasn't our first wake-up call.
In 1993 the American people were confronted with the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. One of the instigators of that attack was on an expired student visa.
Since 1993 we have mandated the tracking of foreign students and gave schools and universities a responsibility to help us monitor these programs while these students are on U.S. soil. Unfortunately, while this tracking system is up and running today, it is still antiquated and the Federal Government remains incapable of ensuring that those students who enter the country are truly attending our educational institutions.
Today nearly 10,000 schools across the country accept foreign students, and those schools are responsible for communicating with our government about the whereabouts of these students. Enrollment of foreign students is increasing.
According to the Brookings Institution, the number of foreign students on F-1 visas in U.S. colleges and universities grew from 110,000 in 2001 to 524,000 in 2012. Despite this overwhelming increase, the technology and oversight of the student visa program has insufficiently improved.
Now, 13 years after 9/11, we have sham schools setting up in strip malls with no real classrooms. We have foreign nationals entering the United States with the intent to study but then disappear and never attend a class. I will give just two examples of sham schools.
In 2011, Tri-Valley University reported that they would bring in less than 100 students but actually brought in over 1,500. Tri-Valley University officials were caught giving F-1 visas to undercover agents posing as foreign nationals who explicitly professed no intention of ever attending classes. Students paid $5,400 per semester in tuition to the school to obtain those student visas until that school was shut down.
On May 29 this year, the Micropower Career Institute in New York was raided by Federal officials. Its top officials were arrested on student visa fraud.
Allegedly, school officials did not report foreign nationals when they didn't attend classes, and they falsified those student records so the school could continue to collect Federal education dollars for those students. But despite the indictment of officials at this so-called school, it still remains open for business.
The Government Accountability Office reported to Congress in 2012 that sham schools posed a problem. We put a lot of faith in the work of the Government Accountability Office. The GAO said the Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have a process to identify and analyze risks across schools. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has overlooked major indicators of fraud, and they cannot follow trends or predict abuse. Two years later the problems continue to exist and the Obama administration just fiddles while the problem burns.
ABC News investigated the student visa program and made it public last week. They said 6,000 foreign nationals on student visas have disappeared. An ICE official acknowledged that they had ``blended into the landscape somewhere.'' Yet this number of 6,000 is not the total number of student visa overstays. This is the number of students that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement is trying to locate. That ought to be alarming news that it is only 6,000.
It is time to close the loopholes and clamp down on schools that have a poor track record with regard to foreign students. So this week I am introducing legislation that requires schools to be certified in order to bring in foreign students, and it would suspend schools if there are noncompliance issues. My bill would increase penalties for those who perpetrate fraud and require background checks and training for school officials. It would also put an immediate end to a flight school's participation in the foreign student program if they are not FAA approved.
Finally, it would require the Department of Homeland Security to deploy an upgrade to the existing tracking system. This upgrade can be paid for by using fees from student visas and the schools that participate.
What I just said aren't new ideas. These are provisions that were taken from a 2012 bipartisan bill led by the senior Senator from New York. That bill never passed the Senate. When the Gang of 8 wrote their misguided immigration bill, they failed to include these reforms. So I offered an amendment during committee consideration of the immigration bill last summer and it was included in the bill that passed the Senate.
The bill I am introducing today is the exact same language. It has been debated. It was accepted by unanimous consent in the Judiciary Committee.
I hope my colleagues will seriously consider the bill I am introducing. It is well past time that we close loopholes and be more vigilant in the foreign student visa program, especially with the growing terrorist threat we face.
REMEMBERING JAMES M. JEFFORDS
Madam President, I wish to pay tribute to Senator Jeffords of Vermont, who passed away last month.
Senator Jeffords died this last August while the Senate was in recess. Yesterday, the Senate appropriately adopted a resolution commemorating the former Senator.
Senator Jeffords is probably best known for switching parties, from being a Republican to an Independent and caucusing with the Democrats back in 2001. As much as that switch hurt at the time, I always held Jim in very high regard and I knew him to be a very honorable man.
Jim and I were both so-called Watergate babies--two of the very few new Republican House Members who survived the 1974 election after Nixon's resignation and subsequent pardon. So we joined the House of Representatives together and became friends then.
It wasn't only a tough political environment back then, it was also a physical challenge for us. During that campaign year I had surgery on my leg and was walking on crutches. Jim had been in a car accident and had a neck brace as a result of that accident.
An amusing story has been reported about the two of us. I didn't hear it myself, but it had been brought up in a report on the funeral. The amusing story is about the two of us walking down the aisle of the House to be sworn in as freshmen after that devastating election for Republicans--this Senator on crutches and Jim with his neck brace.
Somewhere in the Chamber, a Democratic Member yelled out, ``There's two more that we almost got!''
The two of us laughed for years about that because of course we had the last laugh, serving for many years and being elected to the Senate and both becoming chairmen of committees in this body.
One of the most honorable things Jim did for me and, I believe, for the country was in regard to the 2001 tax relief bill that was by some measures the largest tax cut in history. Not many know the history of that bill. I was chairman of the Finance Committee and so was in charge of putting the bill together and getting it passed in the Senate.
The process started with a budget resolution with reconciliation instructions to our Finance Committee.
The Bush administration pressed that year for a $1.6 trillion tax cut. Senator Jeffords and others insisted that the number had to be cut by $300 billion because they feared the money wouldn't be there in the end. Of course, as we now know from history, they ended up being right on that point a few years later when we sank into years of deficit spending, but we needed their votes. I made it clear to President Bush and our leadership that if we wanted to get something done and have a historic tax cut, we had to lower our sights some and still get most of what we wanted.
Unfortunately, I took a lot of criticism from my side for supporting Senator Jeffords and others, but I knew where the votes were and where the votes weren't. I remember a bunch of House Members even had a press conference saying some not-so-nice things about me and the idea of only accepting a $1.3 trillion tax package. But our Senate Republican leadership wanted a good result, and they agreed to compromise in order to get it. That is not something you see nowadays around here on very big bills. If the majority cannot have their way, they just file cloture and let the bill die, which is why we don't get much done around here anymore.
But the pivotal point on the 2001 tax bill came right before the time Senator Jeffords switched political parties. I could never really blame Jim for his decision. I didn't agree with that decision, but I know he felt he had been mistreated by some in our party and had strong disagreements with some of us on issues.
During floor consideration of the tax bill that year, we were near the end, and the Democratic minority at that time was offering amendment after amendment to stall the bill. We had gotten to the point where they were just changing a few words in an amendment and offering the same amendment again.
At that point I walked over to then-minority whip--who happens to be the current majority leader--Senator Reid and asked what was going on. He said: Well, we think things may be changing around here very soon. Of course, I didn't know what he was talking about and I assumed that some votes were going to change. But of course he was talking about the impending party switch that none of us knew anything about involving Senator Jeffords. Remember, at that time we were split 50/50. Of course, what that meant was the Senate leadership would change and presumably the new Democratic leadership would pull the tax bill from the floor and kill it. So it was important for the Democrats to stall as long as they could on the bill, anticipating the Jeffords switch. But to his great credit, Senator Jeffords came to me and told me that out of respect for me and the way I worked with him on this tax bill, he would not officially change parties until after the tax bill was passed. So we were able to finish that historic bill and get it signed into law.
This little-known episode demonstrates what an honorable man and true friend Jim Jeffords was. He didn't let politics dictate whatever he was determined to do, and he stood by his word. I only wish we could see more of that now in today's Senate. If we did, we would all certainly be better off, it would be a better place, our policies would be a lot better, and we would be more productive.
I commemorate Senator Jeffords in his death. My sympathies are with his family. I will miss him, and I wish him Godspeed.
I yield the floor.
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