|
STUDENT AND EXCHANGE VISITOR INFORMATION SYSTEM (SEVIS) |
|
SEVIS is an Internet-based system which maintains accurate and current information on non-immigrant students (F and M visa), exchange visitors (J visa), and their dependents (F-2, M-2, and J-2). SEVIS enables schools and program sponsors to transmit electronic information and event notifications, via the Internet, to the BCIS and Department of State (DOS) throughout a student or exchange visitor’s stay in the United States. The system will reflect status changes, such as admission at Port of Entry (POE), change of address, change in program of study, and other details. SEVIS will also provide system alerts, event notifications, and basic reports to the end-user schools, programs, and Immigration related field offices.
|
The impetus behind SEVIS is to attain better monitoring of student and exchange visitors. Colleges and universities are already responsible for collecting student and exchange visitor data to comply with existing federal regulations. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) mandates that the establishment of electronic reporting of this data. Thus, SEVIS serves to automate the manual data collection process that schools and exchange visitor programs are already utilizing to gather information on their students, scholars, and exchange visitors.
|
SEVIS loses data that has been properly entered – sometimes numerous times – into the system. Data fields populated by school officials are reset or changed for no apparent reason. School officials are not authorized to correct certain errors in the system; they were advised by the SEVIS Help Desk to instead create new records, thus creating multiple files for a single student within SEVIS. Such situations bring into serious question the reliability and integrity of the data SEVIS currently contains.
SEVIS still contains bugs – discovered as users navigate the system – that impact on the ability of school officials to correctly report on their students. In several reported cases, forms printed at one school have been discovered at a school in another state, and partial data, such as an address, from an unrelated individual’s record has appeared on a SEVIS-generated form elsewhere. Documents have printed without complete information. Some schools are finding it technically impossible to process through SEVIS the transfer of a student from one school to another. When this happens, the transfer student is left without the necessary documents at the new school. Such technical problems have made tasks that INS estimated would take only minutes require hours – sometimes days – of staff time to complete.
SEVIS was intended to be a fully integrated electronic database, shared by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State. However, schools and students are not finding this to be the case. Schools create records in SEVIS and generate admissions documents for students, as required, but some consular officers have reported to students who appear to apply for visas that they cannot find their records in the database and thus cannot process their visa applications.
Users are reporting extensive delays, ranging from hours to days, in getting responses from the SEVIS Help Desk. Help Desk staff are often unable to provide information about the status of transmissions by institutions that experience problems, or to advise users on how to correct errors or address glitches. Given that batch transmissions can affect the records – and therefore the legal status – of hundreds of students at a time, this inability to effectively address errors is alarming. Training of immigration officials in the use of SEVIS – at ports of entry, the Help Desk, and regional service centers – remains inadequate.
SEVIS was rushed into operation with very little testing. There was virtually no evaluation of the system’s capacity to sustain a high volume of use. That high-volume period is now quickly approaching, and SEVIS is being “tested” as it is implemented. System users estimate that one million records will need to be added to SEVIS in the next four months. Given the strains SEVIS is showing today, there is great concern that it will not be able to sustain this volume of data, and that the result will be a major system failure at the height of the summer travel and fall enrollment periods.
Clearly, there will need to be some accommodations made to colleges and universities who are finding SEVIS to be unworkable under the present conditions. It is expected that students who find their status jeopardized by glitches in SEVIS, rather than real violations, will have some means for appeal. Any student or exchange visitor who appears at the consulate only to find that they cannot be processed for visa due to a SEVIS glitch should immediately contact the admitting college or university for help in resolving the problem.
|
WHAT IS SEVIS?