The AP reports that a California man has been nabbed assisting Arab students in U.S. visa fraud:
A California man was charged Monday with operating a ring of illegal test-takers who helped dozens of Middle Eastern nationals obtain U.S. student visas by passing various proficiency and college-placement exams for them, federal authorities said.
The allegations reveal a potentially dangerous security breach in the country’s student visa system and underscored the vulnerability of a tracking process that relies on schools and testing centers to verify the identities of people taking the mandated exams.
Eamonn Daniel Higgins, 46, of Laguna Niguel made an appearance in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud as federal immigration agents arrested 16 of his suspected clients who remained in Southern California…
Over a seven-year period, Higgins collected tens of thousands of dollars from foreign students from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Kuwait, Turkey and Qatar before he or his accomplices took their exams at ten southern California community colleges and universities using doctored IDs.
Higgins may have worked with hundreds of foreign students, although authorities have only been able to definitively identify 119.
They believe 48 students remain in the U.S., and authorities are seeking all of them…
A search of Higgins’ home turned up 60 fake IDs, college testing materials and completed exams and payment information from foreign students, court papers said.
Most of those students were presumably just interested in the exceptional educational and economic opportunities available in the US, but certainly if it was this easy to get them in it would be easy to get terrorists in the same way.