Iowa State and many other universities in the United States enroll thousands of international students every year. International students bring tuition for their education, variety for the culture, and contribute to the American economy. American society is (at least was) an open-minded system, including its universities, which attract thousand of elites from all over the world to contribute to science, technology, medicine, etc. in the United States every year. All of society benefits from this open-minded system.

No wonder SEVIS is part of the U.S. government’s efforts to bring security to this country. The improved security will benefit the whole society, but not to only treat international students as potential terrorists (or does it?).

It’s also for the whole society’s benefit that U.S. citizens’ activities are being tracked by the Social Security Number system, as mentioned in the Daily’s Oct. 29 editorial, “International students’ fee is fair.” But this isn’t exactly analogous. The FBI uses part of the tax to track suspects for the security of the whole country — should those suspects pay another fee for being tracked even if they are innocent?

SEVIS is designed to help improve the efficiency of such tracking, but the fact is that many students are facing a long wait (at least three months to be checked, even up to a year) to get a new visa back if they leave the United States, either on a trip or going back home to visit their families. So the tracking database, SEVIS, is rather another barrier built against international students than a computerized system to bring people more efficiency and convenience.

Now people being tracked will have to pay a fee to be tracked in order to make people other than international students in the United States feel safer. All this is just because some of the terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks were holding F1 visas.

Chuanyu Zhou

Graduate Student

Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics