Why Not Let the Foreign Exchange Students Go to High School Here?
I’m puzzled by Mark Krikorian’s objection to exchange programs for high school students — basically he wants to prevent any foreigners from attending 9th through 12th grade in the United States, whereas he’s okay with college or graduate study.
My colleague Jessica Vaughan notes that Hosam Smadi, the Jordanian terrorist arrested in Dallas, came here on a student visa to go to high school. High school? Why on earth would we admit foreign students to go to high school? Foreign students are not immigrants, who have permanent residency and can enroll in whatever high school will take them, but rather people who have no claim to come to the United States but are admitted because a high school approved their admission on a foreign-student (F-1) visa. It turns out there are 20,000 such people, including Smadi’s younger brother, Husein, who was also arrested last week and is “studying for his high school diploma at Wilson High,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. Ironically, the school’s website says “Sorry, Wilson High School does not take out of district students.” So, apparently Americans from, say, nearby Cupertino can’t enroll there but Jordanians can get student visas to fly halfway across the globe to go there.
I’m glad some American high school students get the chance to study abroad, and equally glad that some foreigners get the opportunity to attend high school here. As exchange students go, these kids seem less likely than their college compatriots to overstay their visas or use education as a false pretense to gain entry, and it can’t be a bad thing to expose impressionable 14-year-olds from predominantly Muslim countries to American culture. If the only objection is that one unsuccessful terrorist got in on this kind of visa once, that hardly seems like a sound argument.
and it can’t be a bad thing to expose impressionable 14-year-olds from predominantly Muslim countries to American culture.
depends on your where put them dude. it isn’t american culture. it’s culture<i>s</i> :-)
— razib · Sep 29, 06:41 AM · #
And the point also is that they’ll overstay their visas and become illegal immigrants.
— Withywindle · Sep 29, 01:21 PM · #
Mark Kirkorian is the steve sailer of immigration (actually, I believe Steve Sailer is also the Steve Sailer of immigration). He’s obssessed to the point where you can even see eyerolls in the posts of his collegues at the Corner. Unlike Beck, Limbaugh, et al, him I totally recommend ignoring.
— cw · Sep 29, 02:38 PM · #
You mean illegal immigrants like all of Americans, right Withywindle?
The hypocrisy of us, the beneficiaries of the greatest land theft in modern history, trying to claim that the next group is somehow “illegal” and bad… is stunning.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · Sep 29, 05:23 PM · #
CW,
Since Mark Kriokorian’s job is to run the Center for Immigration Studies, and he was presumably invited onto The Corner specifically to write about immigration, I am not sure it is fair to ding him for being obsessed with immigration.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Sep 29, 07:51 PM · #
Can I be the Steve Sailer of oral sex?
— Tony Comstock · Sep 30, 12:10 AM · #
Wouldn’t you rather be the LaBron James of oral sex?
— cw · Sep 30, 03:28 AM · #
Point taken cw, and I do long for the day when somebody can be the LeBron James of oral sex. But I think it’s in the very naturel of revolutionary thought that there has to be a John the Baptist before there can be a Jesus of Nazareth.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 30, 11:33 AM · #
So you want to be John the Mouthist. And when you meet the new Jesus in the course of your work, you give him a blow job and send him on his way.
— cw · Sep 30, 02:12 PM · #