It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
With his new student visa, Prasanth Goinaka was on a path toward his dream: an MBA from an American university in the heart of Silicon Valley.
That's why his parents back in India were stunned when their 28-year-old son was killed while manning a cash register at a convenience store in Oklahoma City -- 1,500 miles from campus.
A Bay Area News Group investigation has found that Goinaka -- as well as thousands of other foreign students enrolled in schools here -- probably should not have been in the country at all. They're being lured by unaccredited universities that promise help getting a prized student visa. But it turns out that these universities' legal right to assist with visas is in question.
Once here, students like Goinaka often have to go to extraordinary lengths to pay the bill.
A decade after terrorists in the country on student visas carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security -- the very agency established to oversee a tougher visa system -- endorses universities that should be ineligible to issue the necessary certificate...
Tri-Valley University was on that list even as federal agents were raiding the school in January on widespread allegations of visa fraud and alien harboring that left 1,500 foreign students in legal limbo and sparked violent protests in India.
Something else authorities found suspicious: More than 550 students enrolled in the Alameda County university were registered as living at the same address: a two-bedroom apartment on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale.
So how do schools that exist to provide student visas get away with it? U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and other lawmakers are exploring just that, and they're beginning to demand answers. "These sham universities "... operate solely for the purpose of manipulating immigration law to admit foreign nationals into the country," Feinstein and three other senators wrote in a March letter to Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that cited the Tri-Valley University allegations.
Decades ago when Nannapaneni left India to study at Boston University, far fewer universities were approved to accept international students, he said; now, federal data show that 10,000 schools do. In the five-year period that ended in 2009, foreigners in the country on student visas jumped 55 percent to more than 950,000. In the past, these universities were academically rigorous, he said, carefully checking applicants to make sure they were qualified.
Universities or Visa Mills?
By Lisa M. Krieger
Something else authorities found suspicious: More than 550 students enrolled in the Alameda County university were registered as living at the same address: a two-bedroom apartment on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale.
In the five-year period that ended in 2009, foreigners in the country on student visas jumped 55 percent to more than 950,000. In the past, these universities were academically rigorous, he said, carefully checking applicants to make sure they were qualified.
Another remnant from the GW admin. At least something is being done now to stop this.