Would you let absolutely anyone in your house, with no conditions? Of course not. If even an invited guest got rowdy, trashed your kitchen, took over your bathroom, insulted your religion, or invited their friends to set up tents on your lawn, you’d send them packing.
By the same token, no nation should be forced to admit people who hate that country and its values. Visas are a privilege, not a right.
Furthermore, foreigners visiting, studying, or working here have fewer rights and more limited “due process” than citizens – as they should. The rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship should be held to a much higher standard, not watered down and “given” to those with lesser immigration status or skin in the game.
I was a U.S. Foreign Service officer from 1999-2022, and my first tour was to our Embassy in New Delhi, India. We officers on the “visa line” did around 150 interviews a day to determine whether Indian applicants were qualified to come to the U.S. We used a two-page paper form that had little information, which we checked against a criminal and terrorist records database that was not as comprehensive as today’s. If the communications systems went down, we had to rely on CDs that were weeks old to check the names.
All the September 11, 2001, hijackers were in the United States on non-immigrant visas; mostly tourist/visitor visas, although there was at least one holding a student visa. The world became a lot riskier, and the U.S. needed to adapt the way we admitted foreigners.
The massive 9/11 Commission Report detailed inefficiencies and loopholes in the way U.S. intelligence and national security agencies worked with the Department of State to check the names, dates of birth and other personal information of applicants before issuing them visas.
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In response, the State Department added forms and took more information from each applicant, so we knew as much as possible about who wanted to come to our country and why. State also improved the way that information was shared and vetted by the rest of the U.S. government so that everything we collectively knew about any John Q. Foreigner was considered before we let him into the country.
The change in process slowed things at first, but then we adapted and increased efficiency. The entire application process is now done online, where entered data is combined with a photo and fingerprints for each person.
Today, everyone is online, particularly younger people. Every student applicant has a smartphone and most likely multiple social media accounts. What we post online reflects who we are. Anonymity is an illusion – one should not post things one is ashamed of or wants to hide.
As any consular officer will tell you, some people lie in visa interviews. We have something they want: a visa to get into the United States. They might not lie to their mother or priest, but lying to a foreign official is a far lesser sin.
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Given that reality, and the wealth of information available online that truly reflects a person, consular officers would ideally be vetting all applicants’ social media already. Until now, the constraints of staffing – having an individual human access and look through each applicant’s many accounts and possibly thousands of posts – made that prohibitive except in cases deemed worthy of increased scrutiny. Consular units in U.S. embassies have fraud prevention units, but they are not staffed to handle every single case. Nor can every case be elevated for scrutiny by other U.S. agencies.
The growing capacity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will make social media screening, and broader vetting, possible for more applicants.
It makes sense to start with students, as they are in our country much longer than someone visiting Disneyland or attending a business meeting. Most students come to do a four-year bachelor’s degree at least, and many remain to get jobs and become legal residents and, perhaps later, citizens.
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If done right, social media vetting will not slow down the visa process. It won’t keep out most applicants who plan to come here for a specific, valid purpose, tell us the truth, and stick to their word.
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But people who post incendiary, criminal, violent, anti-American, antisemitic, or anti-capitalist content won’t make good visitors, students or future Americans. When I see some of the posts by people here on student visas, or trying to become Americans, I wish a few of them had never received visas.
Like Momodou Taal, who seemed to spend most of his time at Cornell University protesting, occupying buildings without permission, and going “hard for Gaza.” At a protest in 2024, he said “we don’t take our cue from some bullsh*t student assembly at Cornell. … We take our cue from the armed resistance in Palestine.” Cornell refused to suspend him because they didn’t want him deported.
Given that our colleges are willing to champion those who hate the West, capitalism, and our allies, defending the national interest is up to those who issue visas. It’s quite possible that a review of Taal’s social media before they issued his visa would have revealed ineligibilities and saved us having to find a job for one more “Africana studies” PhD.
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Then there’s Kishan Kumar Singh, Mahammadilham Vahora and Hajiali Vahora, and Vedantkumar Bhupenbhai Patel, all of whom were here on visas ostensibly to study when they were arrested in separate cases across the country for allegedly trying to scam elderly Americans out of their money. What might their social media have shown?
Looking at Chinese students more carefully, in particular, might stop a future Shenghua Wen – the Chinese student who overstayed his 2012 student visa, dropped out of school, and apparently went into business shipping arms to North Korea. Chinese students being caught smuggling in suspicious items and engaged in research that could benefit the PRC and undermine the U.S. are happening with alarming frequency.
The U.S. has over a million foreign students here already and issues almost half a million more such visas every year. Weeding out a few who are more intent on rioting, protesting, or doing nefarious research than getting a degree will encourage the rest to respect our country and our rules.
