ESSAY: Round-trip journey to nowhere
If State, with all the in-country expertise it has at hand grants a student visa after a detailed application process, is it fair to leave it to the whim of a CBP officer at the airport to deny entry?
Imagine the surge of excitement you feel as you board a big plane in Beijing en route to the US for the first time. You take a deep breath, fasten your seatbelt and get pulled back into your seat as the jet rumbles down the runway and takes off to lift you into the sky and fly you to America’s capital city. You are finally going to the US to pursue graduate studies at a top university. It’s a moment to appreciate the sacrifices of your parents, to reflect on the long hard years of study to excel not just in your chosen area of science, but in the difficult-to-master foreign language of English as well.
Fifteen hours later you land in the US for the first time. You are jet-lagged, disoriented and fatigued but excited to have arrived at last, to be in the country that represents to you a gold standard in higher education.
Drowsy, but pumped up with eager anticipation, you stand on a long, slow-moving line, waiting to get stamped in. You wonder where to change money and find the ground transport that will deliver you to your campus dorm. You can’t wait to get in, take a shower, perchance get some sleep and unpack your bags. Your adventure in America is about to begin!
Unless it’s already over.
Consider the fate of a Chinese student who recently arrived in the US to study as recounted in Science magazine:
“It was a 50-hour ordeal in December 2023 that began at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C. It included an 8-hour interrogation and a body search by agents of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), 12 hours in solitary confinement, and the required purchase of a $3700 one-way ticket to Beijing. ‘How did I end up back here?’ she lamented in a blog posted by the news unit of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.”
The US State Department is responsible for granting visas for US study. One reason it takes a long time to snag a visa is to allow experts in the field to exercise due diligence in granting visas only to bona fide students in good standing.
US regulations create barriers for students from institutions with links to the Chinese military and party membership, but well-trained US officers working the embassy and consular circuit in China are capable of navigating this thicket of rules to decide who gets a visa and who doesn’t.
Inevitably, mistakes are made, with good candidates denied and not-so-good candidates let through, but once vetted by State, there is virtually no reason why anyone should be granted a visa only to be rejected upon arrival.
US Customs and Border Protection officials are quite adamant in their assertion that they have the right to deny anyone entry at any time for whatever reason, but that’s a provision best used with great restraint, and only after a very careful consideration of the facts, and then used only sparingly in exceptional circumstances.
Recent reports suggest that CBP agents are using their prerogative in a rather rude and cavalier way to deny entry to Chinese who have already been vetted by State as bona fide students. Whether the rejecting officer does so out of petulance, ignorance, racial profiling or prejudice animated by the steady stream of anti-China rhetoric in US politics, the end result is the same.
The recent flurry of interrogations and airport turnarounds raises the worrying possibility that sticking it to Chinese students is a feature, not a bug, of CBP’s policy regarding arrivals from China.
The CBP is no stranger to accusations of prejudice, abuse and racial profiling. Some of its employees, or rather former employees, attest to the poor sense of ethics that pervades the organization.
In 2022, the Guardian ran a piece entitled: “I was a border patrol agent. The experience was horrifying.” A current CBP employee from Montana writes, “Good pay/benefits - horrible ethics…Rules for thee but not for me.”
Perhaps the worst manifestation of CBP practice can be seen on the southern border of the US where at times war-like practices and war-like enmity are in play.
CBP agents certainly have their work cut out for them, and it is not to disparage the integrity of those agents who try to do the right thing in a broken system, but the work of refusing entry to the US is best left to the State Department. Like any bureaucracy, State is not without its own arrogance and blind spots, but there are numerous officials sufficiently well-trained in the fine points of US-China diplomacy, educational exchange and areas of concern in China’s military-educational complex.
The average CBP agent knows none of this, and one gets the sense the power to deny entry is a power that can, at times, get the better of the ego of the person exercising such a power.
Although the recent horror stories involving students already granted visas to attend schools such as Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell and Harvard are in some cases being litigated and are difficult to evaluate, what can be said without a doubt is that the left and right hand of the US government are at odds with one another.