Scientists Fear Visa Trouble Will Drive Foreign Students Away
EXCERPTS from The New York Times, March 3, 2009
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When Alena Shkumatava opens the door to the “fish lab” at the Whitehead Institute of M.I.T., she encounters warm, aquarium-scented air and shelf after shelf of foot-long tanks, each containing one or more zebra fish. She studies the tiny fish in her quest to unravel one of the knottiest problems in biology: how the acting of genes is encouraged or inhibited in cells.
The work, focusing on genetic material called micro-RNAs, is ripe with promise. But Dr. Shkumatava, a postdoctoral researcher from Belarus, will not pursue it in the United States, she said, partly because of what happened last year, when she tried to renew her visa.
What should have been a short visit with her family in Belarus punctuated by a routine trip to an American consulate turned into a three-month nightmare of bureaucratic snafus, lost documents and frustrating encounters with embassy employees. “If you write an e-mail, there is no one replying to you,” she said. “Unfortunately, this is very common.”
Dr. Shkumatava, who ended up traveling to Moscow for a visa, is among the several hundred thousand students who need a visa to study in the United States. People at universities and scientific organizations who study the issue say they have heard increasing complaints of visa delays since last fall, particularly for students in science engineering and other technical fields
The official said that time limits for visas were ordinarily a matter of reciprocal agreements between nations. Dr. Shkumatava’s case, he said, may have been further complicated because Belarus severely limits the number of foreign service officers the United States can have there at any given time...
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Dr. Shkumatava said she will probably return to Europe. Her husband, a computational biologist from Germany, left the United States last fall for a job in Vienna. She might have tried to stay on, she said, if entering and leaving the country were not such a “discouraging” process.
“I got the visa and so I am back,” she said. “But it’s for only one year, so next year in December if I am going to stay here I am going to have to reapply for this stamp.”
This article appeared in
Belarusian Review, Vol. 21, No. 1
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Cornelia Dean
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