Without warning or explanation, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow has rejected an unprecedented percentage of Russian university students applying for visas to take part in the State Department's popular Summer Work and Travel program this year, dashing hopes and placing the program's future in doubt.
About 80-90 percent of the estimated 1,000 applicants who have applied for visas in Moscow since mid-March have received a green rejection slip, according to five Russian agencies that arrange the interviews. Last year, the number was 35-40 percent, they said, and more than 6,300 in all were approved.
The embassy refused to directly comment on the allegations, but agencies say the reasons sometimes provided by consular officers to individual students — that the applicant's employer is "unreliable," or that the applicant's English is not good enough — are bogus.
The program, however, has also been dogged by scandal. About 10 percent of Russian participants overstayed their visas, Samaryanov said, and media reports emerged of students, often Russian, enduring slave-like conditions.
In late 2011, New York prosecutors charged 20 in an alleged scheme organized by the Gambino and Bonnano crime families to bring Eastern European women to the United States on fraudulent work-and-travel visas to work as exotic dancers.
Program rules were tightened that year, particularly in Russia, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries that the State Department said had a "higher prevalence of problems," and the total number of students was capped at 109,000, down from the high of 153,000 participants in 2008.
A possible explanation is lingering concerns about mistreatment and human trafficking that have embarrassed the State Department in the past. Last month, a group of student workers made national headlines by protesting working conditions at a McDonald's in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, an incident that suggested that the government has not yet succeeded in stamping out program abuses.
Read more: U.S. Embassy Slams Door on Student Workers | News | The Moscow Times
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