We’ll all be much safer this coming January. According to a press release from the California State University Chancellor’s office, the CSU system is joining with PeopleSoft Inc. to track all the foreign students in attendance.

All that talk about Homeland Security and I bet you never thought that your school would be affected, well, now it will be. PeopleSoft’s Patriot Act SEVIS Solution (PASS) will monitor the more than 15,000 students that attend our state’s schools.

Foreign residents with student visas number from anywhere from 200,000 to Attorney General John Ashcroft’s estimation of one million. With the fall passage of the Patriot Act and approval of the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act (EBSVERA) in May 2002, more than 3,000 immigration inspectors will be added to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) will be implemented at Universities. According to Ashcroft’s speech introducing SEVIS, information about a student’s status will be made “available centrally to the INS in a database. And perhaps most importantly, it will allow the schools to transmit the information electronically via the Internet.” The INS will have instantaneous information about a student’s whereabouts. Kind of like an electronic dog collar.

Ashcroft goes on to say that the INS “will be accountable for enforcing violations of that status.” With the Department of Homeland Security allocated a bloated budget of $37 billion, there is a huge potential for a bureaucratic bog down waiting to happen. For goodness sake, the DMV lets those little old ladies who cannot see over their steering wheels drive and we are expecting a bunch of already overworked immigration officials to sniff out one or two possible “terrorists” in several million?

Besides the bureaucratic nightmare, the potential for racial profiling is enormous, and in fact, has already happened.

CSUS students have already been affected by this profiling. Two students cannot return to school to graduate because they are waiting for the paper work to come through. They returned home to Egypt for the summer Meanwhile, they are enrolled and accumulating “F’s” in their classes.

The Migration Policy Institute reports that another section of EBSVERA will target those visiting from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria. Now before you go, “Well of course, those folks want to eat us alive!” let’s take a look at history.

During World War II, we treated those of Japanese descent like we are treating our “enemy aliens,” containing people without any trial or even charges given to them. We also did this during the McCarthy era. In retrospect, we realized we were wrong.

Already we have detained for months, without charges, between 1,500 and 2,000 people. It’s awful! We are tracking them down due to some perceived connection, not on any sort of actual action. The way it’s going now, argues David Cole in “The Nation”, a Quaker activist could be detained for sending a piece of non-violent literature to a terrorist suspect. And the biggest problem is, that there are no rights granted to all people by the Constitution, not simply citizens – given to these detainees. As Sixth Circuit Judge Damon Keith wrote regarding the unconstitutionality of these actions, “Democracies die behind closed doors.”