After 9/11, Overseas Students Find Foreigners Need Not Apply
Yew Choe (Joe) Wong was lucky. The Malaysian civil engineering students months-long wait for a visa in 2002 only cost him his first semester at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But the long wait and deep silence from U.S. authorities about his visa status was harrowing enough.
Even with help from local politicians and nonprofit groups, Wong got nowhere. "They never told me exactly what was going on," he says. "I just sat there waiting frustratingly."