Knee-Jerk reactions won't cure the visa issues. (Opinion).

The terrible events of Sept. 11, bringing as they did an end to our national sense of safety at home, raise some disturbing questions: How do individuals live in our midst while plotting the destruction of our country? How did they get here in the first place?

We know the answers to these questions. This country has always been a melting pot, especially welcoming immigrants from those nations we know to be repressive, to violate civil rights, and even to torture and murder their own citizens in the name of religion or political loyalties.

We want to be a tolerant nation, and our policies reflect that. We give the benefit of the doubt, where some other countries would not. These are values that can guide responsible policy, but they must be paired with methods that allow us to ensure that these values are respected.

Today, approximately 4 million citizens of other countries are living illegally in the United States. Many entered legally, often with temporary visas giving them limited permission to study, to conduct business or to travel for pleasure.

But the Immigration and Naturalization Service has virtually no capacity to ensure the terms of these visas are honored. There is no centralized database that would facilitate the tracking of individuals on temporary visas. Even if the database were there, the personnel who would track violators of visa provisions are not.

Problems Must Be Fixed

These problems must be fixed. And the sooner the better. But some of the proposals recently emerging in Congress are off the mark.

For example, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California is advocating a moratorium on student visas for six months. Yet only about 1.8 percent of all those visiting from other countries do so on student visas.

Yes, prohibiting Ham Hanjour, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, from entering this country on a student visa, or finding him and expelling him when his visa expired, could have saved all of the lives lost in the Pentagon and on the plane that struck it. And there is nothing that we wish more for today than to have avoided the unspeakable losses of Sept. 11. But the simplest solution may not be the best.

Prohibiting young people from other countries -- even for a short period of time -- from studying in the United States and seeing how democracy works is giving up a major tool in the fight against terrorism.

Understanding Through Education

Our colleges and universities have taken as a special part of their mission creating international understanding through education. They do this by bringing students from throughout the world to our campuses, to study, to learn, to interact with American young people, and to experience our communities. They also do this by creating exchange programs that send American students to other countries.

The international students whom we educate often become the next generation of leaders in their home countries. They absorb the ideals as well as the knowledge they gain here, they maintain their contacts with the friends they make here, and they also become advocates for our country.

In the case of the world's poorer nations, these future leaders may be our most important investments in those societies.

Surely, we have never had a greater need to cultivate understanding among cultures and nations. At my institution, Alliant International University, more than 58 nationalities are represented among the several hundred students on our undergraduate campus in San Diego.

These include students from Arab and Middle Eastern countries, and students who are Muslims. In a very real sense, these students are the world, and they are our future. Having them in our midst is as critical to the future safety of this country as keeping out Hani Hanjour and others like him.

Who Pays?

But to protect this important investment in the education of the world, we need to invest still more. Universities have been criticized for lobbying against the student visa tracking system formerly called CIPRIS, now known as the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. But the real issue here is who will implement the program and who will pay for it. Colleges and universities can report students who do not register, but they cannot pursue them.

Colleges and universities already incur costs in international programs, and they cannot also bear the cost of creating a database and tracking visa violators. And students from countries where exposure to American values and education is most important are often those least able to pay.

What universities can do and what I believe they are more than willing to do, is to work with the INS to provide the information that agency needs to do its job well.

We need to act, and we need to act now, but limiting all student visas would be shortsighted at best. If the issue is time for databases and new operations to be developed, for new procedures to be put in place, then some targeted and temporary bans may be warranted -- bans on students from certain countries known to be hostile or to harbor terrorists, or bans on students coming to certain types of programs. But let's not say no to education, and let's not say no to international understanding -- not even for a day.

Albino is president of Alliant International University in San Diego.