another one from New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/science/03visa.html?pagewanted=2&ref=science

Scientists Fear Visa Trouble Will Drive Foreign Students Away

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.

A
State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity,
said that delays of two or three months were common and attributed the
problem to “an unfortunate staffing shortage.”

The issue
matters because American universities rely on foreign students to fill
slots in graduate and postdoctoral science and engineering programs.
Foreign talent also fuels scientific and technical innovation in
American labs. And the United States can no longer assume that this
country is everyone’s first choice for undergraduate, graduate or
postgraduate work.

Albert H. Teich, the director of science and
policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, organized a meeting on the subject in January with
representatives from the National Academy of Sciences
and several dozen other scientific and academic organizations. Among
other things, he said, the group will try to bring the issue to the
attention of the new administration.

It would be hard to argue
against security checks for foreigners coming to the United States to
pursue high-level scientific or engineering work. And some experts
argue that people from certain countries — China, India, Pakistan and
Middle Eastern countries are most often mentioned — should be subject
to additional scrutiny.

When visa applicants from problem
countries seek opportunities in research fields related to national
security, the State Department official said, he hoped Americans “would
want us to look at those cases very closely.”

Researchers and
students seeking to enter the United States routinely encountered
difficulties in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, but as security
checks became faster and more efficient, most could count on receiving
a visa or a visa renewal in about two weeks. That appears to no longer
be the case.

“I started hearing this back in early November,”
said Amy Scott, assistant vice president for federal relations at the
Association of American Universities. “We are very concerned that we
are losing ground here, that people are missing the opportunities to
come to the U.S., to teach, conduct research or just participate in a
conference.”

John Marburger, President George W. Bush’s
science adviser, said in an interview in the February issue of the
magazine Seed that “it should be easier to get into the U.S. as a
student,” adding, “We really need to be careful about our openness to
the world.”

According to “Beyond ‘Fortress America,’ â€ a report in January
by the National Academy of Sciences, universities around the world now
have the research equipment and infrastructure to compete with their
American counterparts. When the United States puts up barriers, the
report said, “foreign universities are well positioned to extend
competing offers.”

Or as Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology put it: “There are other
countries that want these folks. They are the best of the best. They
have other options.”

Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook directs the
International Students Office at M.I.T. Foreign students eventually
make it to campus, she said, although the path may be slow and bumpy
and they do not necessarily arrive on time. Problems typically occur if
they leave the United States — for family visits or scientific meetings
abroad — and then find they need a new visa to return.

She told of one student from the Middle East who agonized when he
was called home to the bedside of his dying father for fear he would
not be allowed back to his classes. He made the trip, she said, and his
return was delayed.

Visa requirements vary from
country to country, Ms. Guichard-Ashbrook said, but because some
students must renew their visas often and cannot predict how long it
will take for their documents to come through, some of them spend a lot
of time calculating when they can travel and when they must start the
paperwork dance again.

She and others said that students from all over — even the European Union
and Australia — had had problems, but that they seemed most acute for
people from China, India, the Middle East and Russia. Belarus was part
of the former Soviet Union, which might explain some of Dr.
Shkumatava’s difficulties, said Kathie Bailey Mathae, director of the
Board on International Scientific Organizations, part of the National
Academy of Sciences.

“You are never going to have a system
that is 100 percent guaranteed to get people in, in the time they need
to be in,” she said. “But when you see problems recurring and the same
sort of problems over and over — that’s when you know you have a
problem.”

She said researchers were increasingly unwilling to
schedule conferences or other scientific meetings in the United States.
Although the problem is particularly acute for meetings organized on
short notice, she said, some groups are looking for sites outside the
United States even for meetings scheduled two years or more in advance.

“That’s unfortunate,” the State Department official said. “We
want people to think this is the best place to hold their meetings.”

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.

Dr. Shkumatava said her experience was
particularly nerve-racking because she was kept from her lab for three
months, just as she was struggling to publish new findings before her
competitors. When she was required to hand in her passport in Moscow,
employees at the embassy lost it, stranding her there for nine days
with no documents.

When she returned to the United States, she
found that two colleagues had also been stranded by visa problems, one
in India and the other in Peru.

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.”