Eleven Egyptian student visa holders landed at JFK Airport and disappeared.

AP/Newsday: “FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko said there is no threat associated with the men.”

Robert Spencer: “Sure. That’s why they’re hunting for them.”

I love how the university that sponsored the Egyptian students is downplaying this as just some youthful dalliance rather than the routine, security-undermining exploitation of our temporary visa system that it is:

Rather than a case of international intrigue, this may well be a case of the Big Apple offering greater temptations than the Big Sky.

“I think these students decided they wanted to use their time in other ways, connected to being in New York, rather than Montana,” Norm Peterson, MSU’s vice provost for international education, said Monday.

Although Montanans may think of MSU as a great mecca, its fame as a wonderful, euphoric place to live and study “has not reached audiences around the world,” Peterson said.

“We fight an image problem all the time,” he said. “It may be one of the things that happened.”

Tra-la-la.

The men’s visas have been revoked, and they will be put into deportation proceedings once they have been located.

Which will take, like, forever.

Flashback: Foreign student visa tracking fiasco

Related: Bill West at The Counterterrorism Blog spotlights the government’s stymied efforts to deport a Palestinian illegal alien for having overstayed his nonimmigrant student visa when he first entered the United States some 27 years ago.

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