In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, one of the U.S. Senate’s leading voices has decided to seek a six-month moratorium on the issuance of new student visas to international students seeking to study in the U.S.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) announced late last week that she would introduce legislation to reform the U.S. student visa program—which currently is easily abused, she said. She noted that a number of the suspected terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks were in the U.S. on student visas—even though they never attended the schools in which they were supposedly enrolled.

“Today, there is little scrutiny given to those who claim to be foreign students seeking to study in the United States,” Feinstein said in a press statement. “In fact, the foreign student visa program is one of the most unregulated and exploited visa categories.”

Feinstein’s moratorium proposal is intended to allow the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to modernize its procedures and increase its scrutiny of student visa applicants. Feinstein would require that new visas only be granted to those undergoing much more extensive background checks, including fingerprinting.

“I believe that we need a temporary six-month moratorium on the student visa program to give the INS time to remedy the many problems in the system,” Feinstein said.

But Harvard officials said that such a plan is highly flawed.

Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director of federal and state relations, noted that student visas account for less than 2 percent of all visas issued. A moratorium on issuing student visas, while prohibiting talented scholars from coming to the country, would likely not inhibit the flow of terrorists into the country, he said.

Casey said that while many of the specifics to overhaul visa laws that are contained in Feinstein’s bill have been proposed in the past, particularly after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the proposal to completely stop the flow of students into the U.S. was completely new.

“You have to be concerned of moving too fast,” Casey said.

Director of the Harvard International Office Sharon R. Ladd added that the idea of a moratorium was so extreme, she could not really even imagine how it would work.

About 3,300 international students currently study at Harvard. Feinstein’smoratorium proposal would not affect those students who have already been granted a visa, but only those applying now.

Harvard has already begun efforts to lobby against Feinstein’s moratorium proposal. Casey said that so far the University is primarily working through the American Council on Education (ACE), a broad-based Washington organization which lobbies on behalf of educational interests. Harvard has also had discussions with the office of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56 (D-Mass.) on the University’s opposition to the proposal. Kennedy serves as the chair of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration.

The ACE sent a letter to university presidents last Friday urging them to personally contact their senators to argue against Feinstein’s proposal. However, Casey said that Harvard’s top administrators have not yet been directly involved in the efforts to defeat the moratorium—although they may take action after the proposals become more concrete.

The proposal would also require universities to provide detailed quarterly status reports on all their international students, confirming that they are still enrolled in school. Casey said that Harvard would work to make sure any legislation approved by Congress did not overburden the University.

Feinstein was not oblivious to the controversy her proposal was likely to cause. But she said that given the danger from terrorists that the nation currently faces, such measures are necessary.

“This may be controversial, but there has to be recognition that this is an unprecedented time in the country and our national security depends on our system functioning to ensure that terrorists do not take advantage of the vulnerabilities in the student visa program,” Feinstein said in her statement.

While Harvard strongly opposes the moratorium portion of Feinstein’s proposal, officials did note that it also contains provisions the University agrees with.

Casey said the University was pleased to see that Feinstein proposes full government funding of the foreign student tracking system, which must go into effect by 2003 under current federal law. The funding source of the program remains unclear, and potentially may fall on universities.

—Staff writer Daniel P. Mosteller can be reached at dmostell@fas.harvard.edu.