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Opening statement of Chairman Bill Delahunt
Chairman, Committee on Foreign Affairs' Subcommittee on
International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight
At a hearing on "International Students and Visiting Scholars: Trends, Barriers, and Implications for American Universities and U.S. Foreign Policy"
June 29, 2007

The Subcommittees will come to order. This is a joint hearing between our Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, and the Education and Labor Committee's Higher Education and Competitiveness Subcommittee, chaired by the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Hinojosa, who must be absent due to an emergency in his district, with the gentleman from Florida, Mr. Keller, serving as the ranking member. I thank them and the distinguished chair of the Education and Labor Committee, my friend and landlord George Miller, for assisting us in holding this important hearing.

Why is it so important to hold a hearing on international students and visiting scholars? From the perspective of our national interests, it is very important, for three reasons:

First, international students and scholars strengthen our domestic economy by bringing in both their dollars and their creativity.

Second, their time here promotes international development, one of our most important long-term national interests, by transmitting skills and knowledge needed by other countries to prosper, which, if I may add with crass American self-interest, will help our economy grow as well, as today's less developed countries become stronger trading and investment partners.

Third, welcoming students and scholars here from other countries enables the sort of multilateral discussion and cooperation, both when they are here and when they return home, that we need to achieve our foreign policy goals.

Today's witnesses will be able to tell us a lot about the first two of these reasons for increasing the number of international students and visiting scholars, namely the benefits to our economy and to international development. Let me discuss briefly the third reason, our ability to work with other countries to achieve our foreign policy goals, in light of some of the findings of a series of hearings we have just concluded on foreign opinion and its impact on our national interests.

Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes, who is ably represented here today by her higher education specialist, Deputy Assistant Secretary Tom Farrell, told me recently that she believes that having foreign students at American universities is the most powerful tool we have for public diplomacy. I agree.

Our international reputation has been damaged badly since 2002, when the Bush administration spurned the framework of multilateral institutions that the United States established after World War II, and began its unilateral march to folly and tragedy in Iraq. A series of ten hearings held by our subcommittee has revealed that the sharp decline in international favorability toward American leadership creates concrete costs to our national interests. For example, according to a witness in those hearings, Dr. Steven Kull of the noted polling organization PIPA, al Qaeda's ability to recruit and to operate in the Middle East has been enhanced by the increasing belief among Muslims since the invasion of Iraq that the United States is engaged in a war against Islam.

One of the few bright spots in the 10 hearings that we held on foreign opinion came when the pollsters agreed that foreigners who visit the United States have significantly higher approval ratings for us, roughly on the order of 10 percentage points, than do foreigners who do not visit here. The witnesses agreed that students, in particular, tend to form positive impressions and friendships here that make for lifelong bond with America and Americans, and that they even pass along these positive attitudes to their friends and extended families back home.

I should note that getting to know us doesn't seem to change students' levels of opposition to such controversial American policies as allying with and arming dictators in return for strategic benefits, or invading and occupying Iraq, or kidnapping and abusing suspected bomb plotters - policies that in fact I, and I believe a majority of Americans, oppose as well.

What studying here does do, however, is open up lines of communication, and remove feelings of automatic suspicion and bias that can keep us from talking to each other, and eventually working with each other on common objectives. Nobody can go it alone in today's world. The problems we face simply cannot be solved alone. From a foreign policy perspective, student and scholar exchanges are valuable because they create a new basis for discussion and cooperation in solving mutual problems.

That is why I am so concerned about the dramatic disruption after 9/11 in the trend-line for international students that we will hear about from our witness from the Government Accountability Office, Director George Scott, a disruption that has resulted in 247,000 less years of study than was predicted before that tragedy.

That is why I am so concerned about reports from the Woods Hole scientific community in my district of Cape Cod about potential visiting scholars being discouraged by visa waiting times and being rejected due to political disputes between our government and theirs.

That is why I am so concerned about today's testimony by Dr. Jerry Mellilo of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, in which he says that planners of international scholarly and scientific conferences often don't even bother to try to hold these conferences in the United States.

That is why I am so concerned about the testimony of Ms. Adinah Abbey, our exemplary international student witness today, who points out that the lack of U.S. government funding means that foreign students are almost exclusively from wealthy families or wealthy countries, leaving out the potential future leaders, scientists, and teachers from the very countries that are most in need of our universities' store of knowledge.

That is why I am so concerned that only 3,000 of today's 570,000 international students are funded by our government, and that is why I hope to develop with the administration and my colleagues a billion dollar program.

And that is why I am so eager to learn the lessons of the pioneering work of the Davis United World Colleges Scholars program, whose director, Dr. Phil Geier, is also a witness today, and to start talking with the Administration about a new public initiative to bring 20,000 African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American students here who could otherwise not afford a university education.

Think about it - we spend a billion dollars every three days in a senseless war that is destroying our international standing and our ability to find allies to help us face future problems. Why not spend that much just once a year, on a program that will enhance our standing, and create cooperation for the future? Today I hope we will take the firs step on our longer journey to address all of these concerns.

Before introducing our first panel, let me turn to my colleagues for their opening remarks.

Our first panel, of government witnesses, has tremendous expertise in the issues before us, namely trends, barriers, and possible solutions in the area of international study and scholarship in the United States.

George Scott is a Director at the Government Accountability Office, and is responsible for overseeing all work in the area of higher education. He participated in the planning and writing of the 2007 GAO forum report that assessed the status of international students in the United States and identified three areas for consideration in resolving existing problems.

In Tom Farrell, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Academic programs, and James Manning, Acting Assistant Secretary of Education for Post-Secondary Education, we have perhaps the two people in the United States Government most qualified to respond to the GAO report, and to give us the Bush administration's perspective on international students.

Secretary Farrell has been involved in international education for nearly 30 years, including stints with the State Department and the Institute of International Education. Appropriately enough, as a former Fulbright scholar in Pakistan, he is the lead officer in the United States Government for the Fulbright program, which funds more international students than any other government program. I am hoping he can in particular tell us about that and other U.S. government funded programs for international students.

Secretary Manning's credential are impeccable with me, not just because he hails from Boston and graduated from Northeastern University, and not just because he has worked for 30 years in senior positions in the Department of Education and a number of other federal programs, such as First Lady Nancy Reagan's "just say no" campaign. No, I think Mr. Manning's greatest professional achievement has got to be his eight years as director of international events for the National Basketball Association. Anyone who can pull off the NBA South Africa tour and the USA Basketball Women's World Tour can handle anything. Jim, we are eager to hear not only your thoughts about the impact of foreign students on our American universities, but any tales you can tell us about those tours.

So, let's proceed in that order, so that we can get the GAO's ideas on the table, and then hear from the administration's witnesses.

Thank you to the panel. I hope you will remain for the second panel, so that you can pick up some ideas from their testimony, and at a later date can discuss informally with me your thoughts on it. Our second panel is drawn from the private sector, and I think that we will need a strong government-private partnership to achieve anything in this field.

For our first witness on this panel we are delighted to welcome Ms. Adinah Abbey, founder and director of Africa New foundation, which supports schools in Africa. Ms Abbey was a foreign student from Ghana, and I am sure that when the Committee hears of her achievements they will be as inspired as I was. She will also be giving us a first-hand look at the challenges of getting to be, and then being, a foreign student in the United States.

Ms. Abbey will be followed by Dr. Philip Geier, director of The Davis United World College Scholars program, a successful, and astonishingly large, private foundation, housed at my alma mater, Middlebury College. The program funds and supports at American universities 1,100 graduates of the 12 United World College prep schools that are scattered around the world. Dr. Geier previously served 12 years as president of one of those preparatory schools, which are such a crucial element in the success of the program.

Then we will hear on the speaker-phone from Dr. Jerry Melillo, director and senior scientist of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Dr. Melillo's doctorate is from Yale, and his research is in biogeochemistry. My staff and I had, of course, absolutely no idea was biogeochemistry was! After careful study, we now think it has something to do with the impact of human-produced carbon and nitrogen on soils and climate. Clearly, whether or not we on this side of the dais understand much about it, this is a crucial and cutting-edge field, and as a frequent convener and attendee in important international scientific conferences in this area, Jerry is uniquely qualified to tell us about problems that organizers encounter when they try to hold their conferences in the United States.

Ms. Katherine Bellows is with us to provide a close look at how one university approaches the challenge of recruiting and retaining international students. She is the executive director of the Office of International programs at Georgetown University, here in Washington. Ms. Bellows has been working in this field for 25 years, including stints as an officer in various bodies of the Association of International Educators, and we appreciate her willingness to come and walk us through the nitty-gritty of making these program work.

We also have with us today Ms. Jessica Vaughan, senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies, who is smart enough to live and work in Boston, despite her center being based here in Washington. Ms. Vaughan, I have personal reasons for hoping you will tell me how I can pull that off too! Ms. Vaughan is a former foreign service officer with a master's degree from Georgetwon University, and she has directed international exchange programs at the University of Vermont law School. If this hearing gets out of control, I not that she also an important expertise, secondary only to her expertise in immigration studies, as a lacrosse referee.

And, appropriately, our wrap-up witness will be Marlene Johnson, executive director and CEO of the Association of International Educators, whose organization has perhaps the broadest and most comprehensive view of the problems we face in attracting and retaining international students. Ms. Johnson will be helping us find some common threads from the day's testimony so that our subcommittees can chart a way forward with the Administration. I note that this task will be nothing new to her, since she served for eight years as the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, where political debate has always been, shall we say, interesting, even before a professional wrestler was elected governor.