The Usual Suspects

by Lizzie Seidlin-Bernstein, '03

The summer before Abdullah Alsharekh came to Brown for the first time, he nearly forgot to apply for a student visa. He suddenly remembered during a family vacation in the south of France, just two weeks before his scheduled arrival in Providence. "My parents were furious with me for my stupidity," Abdullah says. Reluctant to fly all the way home to Kuwait to get a visa from the U.S. embassy, he made a few calls and discovered that the consulate in Marseilles, just two hours away by car, could issue a visa as well. The whole process was "painless," Abdullah recalls. He showed up at the consulate, dropped off his passport and paperwork, and went for a cup of coffee at a nearby cafÈ. Within three hours, he was on his way, a fresh visa stamp in his passport. Another time, after Abdullah had already studied at Brown for a couple semesters, he forgot to turn in his I-20 form, which certifies that he is indeed a student. Luckily, it was no big deal, Abdullah says. "I went to the INS office in Providence and I was like, 'Hey.ah, I was supposed to come here two months ago and I don't know what to do.' They were like, 'Never do this again,' then they stamped my paper." But times have changed. Since hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, killing nearly three thousand people, the U.S. government has become hyper-vigilant in monitoring the comings and goings of foreign students, particularly men from Arab countries. Immediately after the attacks, news spread that two of the suspected hijackers, Hani Hanjour and Ahmed Alghamdi, had originally entered the country with student visas. Six months later, in an embarrassing blunder, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service sent a notice that two more of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, had been issued visas to study at a flight school in Venice, Florida. To prevent such lapses in the future, the government has implemented several new policies that affect international students like Abdullah. Visa processing for male students in most Muslim countries now takes weeks, rather than just a few days, and visas are simply harder to obtain. Starting this January, universities around the country must provide information for a database called the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), which will allow INS to track the country's nearly 548,000 foreign students. In addition, men from 25 countries the United States suspects of harboring terrorists--including most Muslim nations across Asia and Africa--are now required to register with the INS each year as part of the Special Registration program. Students from these countries routinely face long waits and interrogations when they step off the plane at the beginning of the semester. Abdullah, currently in his junior year, now takes every precaution to avoid looking suspicious, since he knows he is automatically suspect in the eyes of American officials. He used to head home for breaks without pre-registering for classes, but now he makes sure to pre-register so he can carry the confirmation sheet--along with his student ID, his grades from the previous semester, and a copy of his paid tuition bill--to the airport as evidence that his intentions are purely academic. Even armed with such proof, Abdullah says the interrogations put him on edge. "It's weird," he says. "I know I haven't done anything wrong, but I always feel guilty. Even if you're not guilty, you look it. It's very, very uncomfortable." Abdullah has a husky voice and a soft accent. The first time we meet, he wears a hooded sweatshirt jacket with the word "Brooklyn" stitched across the chest. For someone who admits that he's "very bad with deadlines and dates and times and appointments," the changing policies have forced an uncharacteristic degree of responsibility. "I do feel violated," he goes on. "But at the same time, what else can you expect from a country that had to go through all this? I feel that these actions are justifiable, because if I was in their spot, would I do the same thing? I think so." At this point, Abdullah's friend Hisham Attar, a lanky and poised junior from Saudi Arabia, breaks in to disagree. He argues that the United States should subject all foreigners to the same scrutiny, rather than profiling Middle Eastern men. "A terrorist could come from anywhere in the world," he says. A note of frustration slips into his voice, which has only the faintest trace of an accent. Unlike Abdullah, Hisham attended high school in the United States, at the elite Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. "It just really pisses me off sometimes that people stereotype me as being a terrorist, even though I've lived here for six or seven years." He describes his interrogation at the Boston airport just a few weeks ago. When Hisham showed his papers to the passport control official, he was sent to a nearby room to wait for questioning. He noticed that the seats in this room were all occupied by Middle Eastern and South Asian men. "I felt very humiliated," he says. "I came like two days before the semester started, so there were a lot of Brown students coming by, seeing me sitting down there." After a long flight from Jeddah, by way of London, Hisham waited another three hours before his name was called. Faisal Alturki, a senior from Saudi Arabia, arrived with his sister Noura, a sophomore, on the same flight as Hisham. As a female, Noura breezed through passport control, but Faisal was pulled aside for questioning. Sporting a fuzzy beige sweater and a five o'clock shadow, Faisal recounts the ordeal with more amusement than Hisham. "Every time someone got up to go to the room in the back, we'd start laughing," Faisal remembers. "We'd say, 'Oh, we're never going to see him again.' But everyone left and everyone came back, so it was all right." During the interrogation, officials asked for basic biographical information--age, place of residence, academic status, and so on--and entered the data into a computer. "The guy typed with one finger--it took him forever. That's why we waited for three hours," Faisal says, grinning. Then it was time for fingerprints and photographs, part of the new Special Registration process. Officials also searched their wallets, copying down their driver's license and credit card numbers. Faisal mostly blames the long wait on inefficient bureaucracy, although he later adds, "I get the feeling that part of the whole process is being slow. Just to make a point. It's an attempt at humiliation. But it's all about how you deal with it." I ask if he felt humiliated, then. "No, of course not," he replies without hesitation. "I think this country is great. If September 11 had happened in another country, I don't think that people who have the nationality of those who perpetrated the attacks would be as well off as they are here." The Federal Aviation Administration has gone out of its way to counter charges of racial profiling in airport security procedures. One employee training manual advises security personnel to use the "but for" test before taking any action: "But for a person's perceived race, ethnic heritage or religious orientation, would I have subjected this individual to additional safety or security scrutiny?" If the answer is no, then the employee shouldn't proceed. Still, officials can always find a justification for their suspicion of foreigners, says Abdullah, who estimates he's been questioned six out of the ten times he's flown into Boston since 9/11. For example, Abdullah often visits friends in Saudi Arabia, so security officials will notice the stamps in his passport and ask questions about his travels. Profiling is clearly taking place at airports across the country, says Steve Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Rhode Island affiliate. Eventually, the newly created Transportation Security Agency plans to develop a profiling system called CAPPS II (short for second-generation Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System) that will analyze passengers' travel reservations, family ties, credit reports and other personal information to determine whether they pose a possible threat. In the meantime, the government has not revealed exactly what criteria it uses to single out certain passengers for more scrutiny. "I don't think it's surprising that people from various Middle Eastern countries are probably bearing the brunt of this system," Brown says. Though inconvenience and embarrassment alone don't amount to a violation of civil rights, profiling on the basis of nationality is of dubious constitutional merit, he claims. Special Registration raises similar legal concerns. Under this system, non-resident foreigners from one of the 25 designated countries must report to an INS office between 30 and 40 days after they enter the country, and once a year from then on. The program's stated purpose is to root out individuals who have violated U.S. immigration laws. The ACLU mainly takes issue with the limited scope of Special Registration--if all foreigners were required to participate, no problem. "But we don't think it's appropriate, fair, or wise to be singling out individuals based solely on their country of origin," says Brown. Furthermore, he is skeptical of the program's potential to prevent terrorism. "If the goal is to harass and intimidate people from Middle Eastern countries, I'm sure that's working. If it's to try to get as many Middle Easterners out of this country as they possibly can through some at least quasi-legal manner, I suppose it will be successful in that respect too. But if it's a way of dealing with terrorism, it's totally ineffective and probably counterproductive." Ineffective because people who have broken immigration laws are unlikely to volunteer themselves for registration, and counterproductive because the program "creates distrust in the communities where trust is necessary," Brown says. Other foreigners living in this country may have critical information to share about members of their community, but they will not step forward if they fear detention or deportation, he explains. John Eng-Wong, director of Foreign Student, Faculty and Staff Services at Brown, offers the following analogy: When Timothy McVeigh was identified as the Oklahoma City bomber, the government didn't immediately suspect all American men as likely terrorists. Instead, investigations focused on individuals who fit a much narrower profile--namely, members of certain militant anti-government organizations expressing the same views as McVeigh. Yet in the case of the 9/11 attacks, the blanket of suspicion covers entire nationalities. "I think there are finer categories of analysis that could be applied, more meaningful levels of analysis," says Eng-Wong, though he isn't sure what those categories might be. While foreign students contend with airport screening and Special Registration, the implementation of SEVIS has caused a major headache for educational institutions. The tracking system requires all American schools, colleges, and universities to provide the federal government with each international student's name, address, major, courses and academic standing, as well as information on any disciplinary actions taken against them. This makes for a formidable amount of data entry--Brown has roughly 400 foreign undergrads and 500 foreign graduate students--and any mistakes could compromise students' legal status. SEVIS does not target Middle Eastern students in particular, but the information gathered could be used for profiling, which saddles university administrators like Eng-Wong with the awkward burden of protecting national security interests at the expense of student privacy. Even if international students don't think about SEVIS on a daily basis, the very existence of such a system contributes to the general sense that they are under constant surveillance. Abdullah says that he used to talk on the phone with his girlfriend, who lives back in Kuwait, for hours every week. "I don't anymore--I don't want to attract attention to myself," he says. He worries that so many phone calls to Kuwait might look suspicious to American authorities. "That has made my long-distance relationship a hundred times harder." Engin Akarli, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Brown, points out the incongruity of the new policies within a democratic society. "Indeed, one of the characteristics of repressive regimes is this sort of practice," he says. "You feel like you're being watched all the time. You're stopped at every checkpoint. The police can come to your door and pick you up and take you for an interrogation. And that's a very ugly feeling. It really makes you hurt, deeply hurt." Nonetheless, Akarli recognizes the need for some amount of profiling in the short term. "In every society, when there is danger, you take measures," he says. "And you can't expect those measures to be nice. The whole point is to minimize the clutch that these measures represent, to minimize their effect because they do hurt people." Ultimately, Akarli contends, the United States should look to eliminate the root causes of the danger--the lack of hope and dignity that drives people to terrorism. The hostile post-9/11 climate has prompted many Arab students to leave the United States. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia even offered free plane tickets home to some students. At Boston University, about a dozen Middle Eastern students left after the attacks, largely due to parental pressure. Faisal noticed that a lot of Saudis studying in the Boston area went home that fall. But when he called his family in Jeddah right after the attacks, his father told him, "Don't come home; don't be chicken." Abdullah says his mother took the opposite view. "I don't want you to stay there another day," she said. "Pack your bags, get everything.and as soon as they open the airports again, you're on the next flight home." But Abdullah didn't want to leave. "I know if I go back home or start studying somewhere else--say, London or something--I'll just get into that life, and I won't feel comfortable coming back here." Hisham's parents left the choice up to him. "They told me, 'If you want to come back, come back, but if you want to stay, we respect your decision.'" He stayed. In fact, none of Brown's roughly 50 students from Arab and Muslim countries chose to withdraw from the university. Faisal, Abdullah, and Hisham soon realized that staying in the States wouldn't be easy. They witness how Americans have projected their anger and fear onto the Middle East, and onto them by association. They blame the media for perpetuating a biased view of the region. Abdullah lists common misconceptions of the Middle East, ticking them off on his fingers: Americans believe people from the Middle East "are very violent, fundamentalist in their religious views; they're against all U.S. policies and hate people from the United States, hate Christians, hate Jews, hate anybody who isn't a Muslim or an Arab; they're very uneducated; they don't know what's good for them." Akarli says that at first, he was impressed with the way the media covered the attacks, making an effort to understand that nineteen terrorists could not possibly represent the entire Arab world. But the tone soon shifted, with "a very organized counter-campaign against Islam, and Arabs especially, as something virtually evil," he says. "There isn't the same kind of sensitivity there was at the beginning." Last semester Hisham was a guest at a local church in Rhode Island, where he spoke to the congregation about the Middle East. "They didn't expect someone from Saudi Arabia to be able to come in and be normal with them," he says. "I was just telling them my point of view, that I definitely disagree with what happened [on September 11], I don't justify the attacks, and all that. And they were really shocked. Unfortunately, the media here only show images of the minority of Arabs who celebrated September 11." Because many Americans have negative views of the Middle East, "I don't really feel comfortable in public," Abdullah says. "Not like I used to before, or as I do in other countries. I always introduce myself as Abe, not Abdullah. And I don't speak Arabic in a loud voice, so I won't attract attention." It's different on campus, though. Hisham, Abdullah, and Faisal all say that they feel welcome at Brown, because the students are so open-minded and well-informed. Even at other colleges, Hisham says, students are sometimes "very ignorant about Saudi culture, about cultures outside the borders of the U.S." in general. Some American universities have reported that applications from Middle Eastern students are down. Studies by the Arab American Institute and the Institute of International Education found that enrollments for Middle Eastern students across the U.S. have fallen since 9/11, in some cases dramatically, even as overall international enrollments increased. Yet according to Panetha Ott, an admissions officer who supervises international recruiting, Brown has not experienced any decline in applications from the Middle East. "People are concerned about the bureaucracy--they ask a lot of questions--but I don't think that's caused them not to apply," she says. Two students did encounter visa delays, but they are both on campus now. Attracting students from Arab and Muslim countries to Brown is more important than ever, Ott argues. "If anything, we think that people from Middle Eastern countries would bring a richness to campus and actually be a necessary component of education, given what's going on in the world," she says. "I think there is a lot of ignorance about what's going on politically, and if part of what we're working toward is international peace and understanding, one way to achieve that is for people to live and work and study together." Abdullah thinks he'll live in Kuwait for a few years after graduation, then return to the United States to pursue a master's degree. But Faisal and Hisham say they're headed elsewhere. "Before September 11, I wanted to work in New York, I wanted to spend some time here, maybe travel around the States," says Hisham. "But now I just want to finish and go back." Faisal says he might go to England for graduate school in development studies. Though he claims that he's very comfortable in the United States, he probably won't return after graduation, not even as a tourist. "What if another attack happens, and I end up getting stuck here because the laws get harsher?" he says. "Plus, it's just so far away from home."