They had congregated because of Special Registration, a new governmental program requiring nonimmigrant men—like Pang—from 18 countries associated with terrorism to present themselves and their legal papers to federal officials. Critics have lambasted the program since its inception.

Pang says the new requirement has marred his experience even after making it to the United States by a narrow margin. He encountered the system immediately after stepping off the plane when he returned from a trip to Barcelona he took this past spring—his first foray out of the country since he barely made it in.

“All the passengers who disembarked were put in a room,” he says. “And you have three immigration officers who are really doing nothing.”

He’s had to repeat the process every three to six months.

“It’s so inefficient,” he says. “That’s the only part I dread whenever I come back.”

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft presented the program a few months earlier as part of an effort “to understand better who is entering and exiting our country.”

But some say the new program is part of a greater problem of racial stereotyping facing students once they arrive in America.

The program met with criticism originating in Washington, too. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56, D-Mass., with two other legislators, wrote a letter to Ashcroft in December 2003, urging him to suspend further implementation of the Special Registration Program.

“We have grave doubts about whether the INS’s implementation of [Special Registration] has struck the proper balance between securing our borders on the one hand and respecting the civil liberties of foreign students, businesspeople, and visitors who have come to our nation legally on the other,” they wrote.

In Washington, in Cambridge and abroad, many continue to wonder where the line between national security and openness to the foreign braintrust ought to fall.

For the moment it remains, like a response to Summer’s letters, an unresolved question—one of many for which Casey says he sees no solutions for months, possibly years.

“The international issues are going to be with us for some time,” he says.

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.