The "Best and the Brightest" Fallacy: Exploring the lesser institutions for foreign students

WASHINGTON, July 15, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- There is a cheaper, easier, safer means for entering the U.S. illegally than paying a coyote thousands of dollars to act as a guide for the treacherous trip from Central America to the U.S. border. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reports on a large number of foreign-students enrolling in one of the marginal educational institutions which are not accredited, yet are permitted to facilitate the entrance of foreign students.

DHS has licensed 16,116 institutions to facilitate the entrance of foreign students; 3,600 of these schools are not accredited. After eliminating the K-12 institutions and the theological seminaries, the Center estimates that there are 900 of these marginal schools that are licensed to bring in foreign students. A large percentage of these students overstay their visas, some never even attend the schools, and disappear, becoming part of the illegal community. 

http://www.cis.org/marginal-schools-for-migrants

"By taking advantage of the DHS' certification of marginal educational facilities, privileged alien students can break the law at a lower cost and lower risk than poor, uneducated alien manual laborers who take great risks to reach the southern border," said David North, a senior fellow at the Center and author of the report. "If there was the will, it would not be difficult to require these institutions to bring up their standards or to terminate their ability to create F-1 and M-1 visas."

The will of Congress is routinely ignored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The agency ignores a law passed by Congress demanding that English-language schools be accredited before receiving foreign students. Only recently has DHS stopped permitting aliens to obtain pilot-training in entities not recognized by Federal Aviation Authority, in direct defiance of Congress. DHS also authorizes schools that only provide weekend courses, allowing students to work full-time despite being an educational program not a non-immigrant worker program.

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.

Contact: Marguerite Telford
202-466-8185, [email protected]

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SOURCE Center for Immigration Studies