Visa Delays Prevent Travel

Kooi Pang received his visa to enter the country on Sept. 29 and traveled from Malaysia to Harvard’s Design School the next day—arriving three weeks late, on the final day of registration.

While he waited for his visa, Pang missed two weeks of classes and significant work in the GSD’s Urban Planning and Design program.

But he considers himself lucky to have made it to Harvard at all.

Several other Harvard students from 26 countries for which the State Department has new, strict, post-Sept. 11 visa policies were unable to make their deadlines and had to defer admission until next year.

In addition to students from Harvard’s Law School, Business School and the College, a number of professors have faced puzzlingly long waits for travel visas which once took mere days to obtain.

Kept waiting by U.S. Consulates, with no explanation as to why their applications are taking extra weeks and months to process, they say they received little information or help from Harvard.

But Harvard officials say they, too, have faced difficulty in the past few months negotiating a new, complicated visa system while armed with very little information.

Students and Harvard officials worry that if the coming years are anything like this one, the new restrictions could eventually discourage international students and scholars from studying in the U.S.—with repercussions for American higher education and society as a whole.

“Now we’re in a new world, we recognize that,” says Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director for federal and state relations. “What we don’t want to do is turn people away before they apply.”

Hoping for Help

Pang—who credits a group called American Universities Alumni Malaysia with helping him get his visa—says he thinks Harvard did little to advance his cause.

“They were sympathetic to my situation but they basically just gave me a deadline,” Pang says.

Halfway across the world, Ahmed el-Gaili, who is slated to graduate this spring from Harvard Law School, is now taking classes at a London law school and hoping to join his class in January.

El-Gaili is from Sudan, one of seven countries the State Department has deemed a state sponsor of terrorism.

With a newly-long wait for a visa, el-Gaili spent much of September living in hotels, hoping to receive his visa and return to Harvard for his third year of law school.

“I got very frantic at the end of September. I was bombarding [the consulate] with almost daily letters and faxes,” el-Gaili says. “Life sort of normalized when I realized, ‘I’m not going back to Harvard.’”

The Law School granted el-Gaili a special, last-minute “hardship out,” so he could take classes in London, where he spent the end of the summer, and still graduate with his class in June.

El-Gaili credits several Law School administrators and professors with hearing his case and helping him find a London school.

But he says he’s perplexed that University President Lawrence H. Summers—“with the political weight of a former member of the cabinet”—wasn’t able to successfully lobby on behalf of el-Gaili and other students.

More broadly, el-Gaili says he has definitely decided to work in London, not New York, after graduation, due to the extreme difficulty he faced in trying to get a visa.

El-Gaili says he thinks the visa problems are reflective of a wider backlash faced by Arabs and Arab-Americans in the U.S.

“I think it’s detrimental to us and to the long-term interests of America itself,” el-Gaili says.

Unexpected Wait

On Monday, would-be Harvard Business School first-year and Jordan resident Mohamad Al-Ississ ’00 said he still has yet to receive his visa—even though he made his application four months ago.

Al-Ississ, who has deferred entering the Business School until next year, echoes el-Gaili’s concerns that Harvard’s top administrators have not done enough to push for students.

Professors, too, are not immune to new, unexpectedly long delays.

Visiting Lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) Mark Nash, a U.K. resident, waited six weeks to receive a visa to come teach at Harvard—a process which used to take just a few days, he says.

While Nash, who is currently teaching VES 186, “Cinema, Art & The Location of Culture,” says he knew that visas for people from developing countries would take longer, he thought that he would would be fine.

“The U.K. is not an underdeveloped country,” he says.

The new paperwork asked about religious affiliation and experience with nuclear and biological material, he says, and had a special section just for men under 40.

“I don’t think the International Office here at Harvard makes it clear how long it will take,” Nash says.

A Tough Spot For Harvard

State Department spokesperson Stuart Patt says that while there are no guarantees, next year’s visa process might go more smoothly.

“I think that overall we’ve got it down to not more than a month for these cases to go through,” Patt says.

But Patt adds that some applications, like those from the seven countries deemed state sponsors of terrorism, will likely considerably longer.

And, Patt says, students receive no special place in the pile of visa applications.

“We have not singled out students for special treatment,” Patt says.

Patt declined to specify the processes visa applications go through, or the criteria which single out certain applications for extra inspection.

Casey says he has spent much of his time this fall trying to get information about what’s happening and why with visa applications.

“We’re not sure why people are being detained in certain areas, we’re not sure why things are lapsing,” Casey says.

Casey says the new restrictions have both short-term and long-term effects on the University.

“There are several people who had to defer,” Casey says. “There are people we don’t know about who have decided not to come because of difficulties.”

Currently, Casey says, he’s working to arm the University with information about what has happened and what will happen—a difficult prediction to make, since the dust is still settling on the post-Sept. 11 legislation.

Casey is currently compiling statistics on how many students and scholars at how many schools have been affected by the post-Sept. 11 restrictions.

“The best thing we can do is try and get new information and try and catalog the hardships,” Casey says. “Borders are not supposed to mean a lot, but right now they do.”

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.