Photo from a 3 May 2012 US Consulate General, HCMC, Vietnam news brief entitled “EducationUSA Hosts Student Visas Session”: “NIV Chief Mike Sestak talked about student visas.”
Say it ain’t so, Mike! Michael Sestak, the former NIV (Non-Immigrant Visa) chief in the US Consulate General in HCMC, got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. To paraphrase a verse from the The Good Book: greed and arrogance goeth before a fall. Apparently, his generous foreign service officer salary and the various goodies that went with it were not enough. (His salary – after taxes - was $7,500 per month, or 90k a year, from his positions as a Foreign Service Officer and a reservist in the US Navy.) He yielded to temptation and sinned to the tune of at least several million dollars. So much for incorruptible US government employees.
The estimated money that Sestak ”earned” from his extra services, above and beyond the call of duty and the bounds of legality, is what the Department of State’s Keystone Cops (aka Diplomatic Security Service, or DSS) was able to trace. There’s a lot more floating around in the form of cold, hard cash and, possibly, gold bars, and other hard assets. It’s a pleasant thought for Sestak to contemplate as he serves his sentence of up to 20 years in a federal pen.
So while Mike was preaching about the holy trinity of the student visa process (1. be a bona fide student; 2. have the ability to pay; and 3. have plans to return to your home country after graduate or an OPT experience), the only criterion for him was the ability to pay, not for study and living expenses in the US but for the visa itself. Unfettered free market capitalism practiced by someone who was supposed to serve as a gatekeeper.
In the wise and eloquent words of my friend, SC: This must be a huge temptation for those in strategic jobs with no sense of a moral compass. Arbitrary political borders married to supply & demand have a way of ruining careers while fueling the general citizenry’s cynicism. Indeed. Of course, given the virtually non-existent coverage to date in the US mainstream media, not many US citizens are aware of this crime. While the scandal has received extensive coverage in the Vietnamese and English language media in Vietnam, the first major coverage in the US of which I’m aware is this CNN article, which appeared yesterday (5 June):
U.S. Foreign Service officer charged in Vietnam visa fraud case.
Sorry, Mike. You may have the kind of intelligence required to pass the Foreign Service Exam but you’re as bright as a 10-watt bulb when it comes to white-collar crime. How you and your co-conspirators thought you could get away with this is beyond comprehension. A precocious ten-year old could have nailed you on charges of visa fraud, bribery and money-laundering. Y’all know the expression: Follow the money. Add to that some search warrants to access Mike’s Gmail and Yahoo! accounts and those of his co-conspirators and, voila, case solved!
Speaking of the Internet, take a gander at the website of the Consulate General of the United States, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and do a search for “Mike Sestak.” Result? Your search did not match any documents. He disappeared almost overnight or, to be more precise, in the weeks since this story broke. Thank God for the Wayback Machine: Internet Archive. You can delete, but you can’t erase, the cyber equivalent of “you can run, but you can’t hide.”
Golden Rules for White-Collar Criminals (aka White-Collar Crime for Dummies)
Here are some golden rules for other consular officers who are tempted to abuse their positions of authority and trust, those ”in strategic jobs with no sense of a moral compass.”
Rule #1: Don’t get too greedy. Watch the percentages. Make sure your issuance rate is not a blinking red light or a screaming police siren, pun intended. Issuance rates of 8.2% and 3.8% at a high fraud post are an engraved invitation to DSS to peek behind the curtain. Sestak might as well have tattooed his forehead with this come-on and confession: “Kiss me. I’m a visa scam artist.”
Rule #2: If you’ve followed Rule #1, don’t include too many co-conspirators. It’s the converse of “the more the merrier.” Each one is a potential liability and likely to end up in an affidavit and a court of law testifying against YOU. Squeeze ‘em and they’ll spill the beans in a heartbeat. (Loyalty does have its limits; self-preservation is what it’s all about.)
Rule #3: Don’t use web-based email accounts to carry out your crime(s), unless you’re really, really computer savvy. (I’m thinking untraceable accounts, proxy servers and encryption here.) Better yet, limit your conversations to in-person chats and cell phone conversations using numbers that cannot be traced to you.
My Recommendation (assumes you have bypassed the aforementioned rules): Once you’ve put in your time, retire and follow in the footsteps of your fellow retired FSOs and other former USG employees who are making the big bucks without resorting to scams and money-laundering. The revolving door still pays off in spades. Patience really is a virtue. Plan your escape but do it by the book.
Sellin’ Like Hot Cakes!
There have been rumors about “visas for sale” in Vietnam. In a free market economy in which so much is for sale, my response was always “not likely” given the system of checks and balances that the US Mission has (is supposed to have) in place. Trust, but verify. The plot has thickened ever since (five) more names were released, including those of US and Vietnamese citizens that appear in the affidavit as “co-conspirators.”
It’s interesting and disturbing that Sestak wasn’t caught by his employer; it was an informant who brought this scam to the attention of the authorities. That brings up the question: who was minding the store? (Me thinks this case is yet another nail in the coffin of a certain someone’s political pressure campaign to become the next US Ambassador to Vietnam.)
What shocked me more than the visa scam itself was the going rate: 50-70k. I guess the “gang of six” determined that was what the market could bear. Silly, naive me – I would have guessed a few thousand for a visa. What’s ironic is that many would probably have received a visa without the bribe. Mum’s the word but people of means usually stand a much better chance of obtaining a visa. Refunds, anyone?
From 13-16 March 2012 EducationUSA Senior Advisor Ngoc Quach and Consulate Non-Immigrant Visa Chief gave a series of tandem presentations at four different schools in Can Tho, Hau Giang and Ca Mau.
On the one hand, there are qualified and deserving Vietnamese, including parents who want to attend a son’s or daughter’s graduation, and bona fide students, whose applications are rejected because of the “intuition” of the interviewing consular officer, who has the power of God without His/Her wisdom. On the other hand, people like Mike Sestak are issuing visas based on ability to pay. Based on what I’ve heard “on the street” about visas for sale in other countries, I’m wondering if this isn’t the tip of a rather large iceberg.
Dear Reader – What do I say the next time a parent asks whether a US visa can be bought?
MAA
P.S.: The silver lining to this scandal is that we’re not likely to hear too many holier-than-thou statements emanating from the US Mission in Vietnam in the coming weeks and months. Be grateful for small mercies.
Recommended Reading
Here are some articles in English and Vietnamese.
Catching up with the Vos (6 June 2013) Don’t miss the video!
Bộ Tư pháp Mỹ ra thông cáo về vụ “bán” visa (6.6.13)
Sestak khai nhận 1000-5000 USD/visa (6.6.13)
The big visa scam (2 June 2013)
Michael T. Sestak, accused of selling visas, held without bond (4.6.13) Follow-up article
Foreign Service officer made millions in visa-for-money scam, feds charge (23.5.13) Original story
How much time and money were invested in arriving at this lame conclusion? Try to please everyone and you end up pleasing no one. Politics as the art of compromise set against a backdrop of potential legal action.
As Karin Fischer of The Chronicle of Higher Education put it in an article entitled In Report on Paying Foreign Recruiters, Admissions Panel All but Punts, After almost two years, it came down to one word. …In a split-the-difference report that attempts to mollify everyone but is likely to please no one, a commission named by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC, has recommended that the organization change its policies to state that members “should not” pay commissions to international-student recruiters, from the current “may not.” If colleges opt to pay so-called incentive-based compensation, the report says, they should be transparent and have strict accountability requirements in place.
On a side note, it sounds as if NACAC is reinventing the wheel that the American International Recruitment Council (AIRC) painstakingly invented vis-à-vis standards and certification for education agents while managing to retain a rather large gray area. Find a way to work together, guys and gals.
What I find amusing and a little sad is that people who drone on about the “agent issue” have been behind the curve for quite some time. There are institutions of higher education that discovered a long time ago how to select and work with the best agents in key markets. Why not learn from them? In addition, agency-based recruitment, as I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere, has become passé in competitive markets. It’s just one tool among a number in a school’s international recruitment toolbox.
Another issue that is neglected in this debate is the transparency, integrity and accountability of some US institutions of higher education. My company, Capstone Vietnam, for example, works exclusively with regionally accredited schools and even among those we reserve the right to pick and choose our partners based on our own criteria. There are some schools that desperately want (and need) international students but are not ready to welcome them and provide them with a quality experience at all levels. They are not among our clients and partners.
Guest Post: MOOCs for Vietnam?
20/06/2013I first familiarized myself with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in 2009 as an undergraduate student. Since then, I’ve been a fan of sites like Coursera, iTunes U and edX, where I can hang around doing additional reading, submitting essays and listening to lectures by top professors from Harvard, Yale and MIT. Something I haven’t done and probably won’t be able to do in real life.
“The reason they’re unavoidable is that we live some answer to these questions every day.”
Over a period of three months in 2009, I woke up every morning just to find myself contemplating that quote, or the introduction to a lecture series by a professor whose name I’d never known, whose expertise had nothing to do with my work or education and whose nationality was American.
Every Thursday evening
Michael Sandel is the name.
During the aforementioned three-month period, Harvard professor Michael Sandel released two lectures, whose total length was 45 minutes, every Thursday via YouTube and his life project’s website Justice. Taken together, his 24 lectures are nearly the same as Justice, a megapopular course at Harvard University.
A person who had never talked about politics before she was 20, whose knowledge of political philosophy was zero, and who had been overprotected as a Vietnamese, saw herself reasoning about several big moral questions, such as, “Is it right to steal the drugs that your child needs to survive?” and “Would you do it if killing five people meant saving one baby?”
From his lectures, free to the public, I’ve questioned, unlearned and learned the basis of political and philosophical thinking. The West’s major philosophers, including Aristotle, Bentham and Kant, have been mentioned so often by Sandel that I always refer to them when facing a moral dilemma, especially if it happens on a Thursday.
Special Value for Vietnam
Apparently Justice gave me the kind of Ivy League experience that would otherwise seem “too out of reach” or “too distant” in real life.
However, I believe its true added-value for me, as a Vietnamese, is that I received a kind of hand-holding on my philosophical journey, attempting to argue in a systematic way about Vietnam’s chronic issues. This assistance I treasure a great deal, especially given that Vietnam’s “market economy with socialist orientation” entails just so much confusion and that most of the available philosophical tools in Vietnam are outdated.
Taking Justice, for me, was both accessing a free world-class education and learning about alternative ways of reasoning that no Vietnamese professors or government officials would care or dare to teach the youth of Vietnam.
Image courtesy of Inside Higher Ed
MOOCs and Traditional Universities
Since my first experience with MOOCs through Michael Sandel’s Justice was amazing, I forgot to question the implications that MOOCs may have for traditional universities.
Until recently.
On 29 April 2013, a group of San Jose State University professors wrote an open letter to Michael Sandel and expressed their opposition towards using Justice as part of or a substitute for their philosophy courses. The “protesting” professors mentioned the disadvantage of online, non-human learning. They also pointed to the prospect of universities laying off staff in favor of purchasing one-size-fits-all MOOCs for their enrolled students.
I believe the real problem here is not whether universities should incorporate MOOCs like Justice into their curricula, but whether universities must obtain a paid license to use them. No one would be foolish enough to trade MOOCs for real human interaction in the classroom.
For the moment, MOOCs do not have a lot of implications for Vietnam, but when more foreign universities take Vietnam seriously in their internationalization efforts, MOOCs will offend a lot of Vietnamese professors and staff. In fact, the “threat” is already there, given that Michael Sandel’s Justice lectures have been fully translated into Vietnamese.
Vu Thi Quynh Giao
Categories: Commentary
Tags: distance education, MOOCs, online learning, vietnam development, vietnam studies
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