British underground-rockers New Model Army have come to the US six times since 2002, and had no reason to assume they’d have a problem going back. The USCIS Web site notes that the process takes 10 weeks, so when filing for their September 2007 tour, the band’s manager, Tommy Tee, decided to apply a full six months early, in March 2007, just in case. And, as he had heard the horror stories of others’ visa troubles, he additionally hired King’s Traffic Control Group for professional guidance.
The band received no word on their visa status, however, until late July 2007, when the government informed them that a technical question involving their petitioner needed to be resolved. Tee answered immediately, and after six more weeks of silence, began to get nervous. On September 8, 2007 — six months after the initial petition had been filed, and three days after the tour was supposed to start — Tee received word that USCIS had rejected the application for the same technicality that Tee thought had been resolved in July.
Specifically, USCIS couldn’t determine whether the record label petitioning for New Model Army was an agent or an employer. “Why would you reject it because of that?” asks Tee, his incredulity still fresh. “Everything was done [by Traffic Control Group] in exactly the same way it’s been done for 25 years. This was the first rejection that Traffic Control has had for that reason ever, and they’ve been doing this for 25 years.”
It’s tempting, perhaps even easy, to see New Model Army’s story as an unlikely confluence of events. They didn’t pay the extra $1000 that would have expedited their application, and there was a mix-up over an unresolved question that had to be answered — perhaps that sent it back to the bottom of the pile, or perhaps the specific USCIS worker who looked at it was paranoid or overworked or simply didn’t care.
Are the music bloggers over-reacting, or are they right to think that USCIS is Orwellian about granting visas to visiting artists? The middle-ground view is that the system works, theoretically, but when something — anything — goes wrong, the wheels go off the wagon . . . and there are hundreds of things that can go wrong.
Form I-129, Section 4a, Part Q
When musicians have to cancel shows because of “visa issues,” most often it’s not that their applications are denied, but that the process just takes too long. For immigrants looking to establish residence here, long delays are a major inconvenience, but for a band with committed tours and dates and tickets sold, it’s potentially fatal, a humorless Catch-22: you can’t get a visa until you book tour dates, but the visa process itself takes so long that there’s a good chance you will miss them.
These problems have only really started in the past five years, even though non-immigrant entertainment visas — the O and P classes of visa — have remained fundamentally the same for more than a decade. The O1 visa is for individuals with “extraordinary ability in the arts,” the P1 visa is for groups with extraordinary ability, the P2 visa is a rarely used “cultural exchange,” and the P3 is for artists with “culturally unique” talents (say, for example, a Senegalese dance troop).
