Choking Cultural Exchanges

Soon, on my Scottish culture Substack, I’ll be posting an interview with Brian o’hEadhra (Gaelic spelling of O’Hara), the current director of the Scots Traditional Music Forum, and a great Gaelic singer and guitarist. He was scheduled to teach Scots Gaelic language and song in North Carolina recently, but the trip never took place. His U.S. work visa did not come through. The event organizers lost a lot of money, and the participants who were signed up to listen and learn lost a chance to hear and work with a brilliant Scottish performer and teacher.

The current harsh crackdown on immigration is now preventing most foreign musicians from performing in the U.S., so we’re pretty much only going to see the more high-profile, well-funded musicians touring the U.S. for a while. Many foreign musicians and U.S. venues and concert series have lost money, time, and gigs because of this problem. And many of them will not be back for a while. Instead, they’ll get used to touring elsewhere. Visiting the U.S. may not be worth the risk unless things noticeably change.

Visiting performers must complete four steps before entering the U.S., and each requires significant time and funds. First, they have to file a petition with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) proving their talent and their schedule of bookings, which cannot be changed once the petition has been filed (this has proved an issue when musicians are not allowed to fill in their schedule with extra events that come up, or when concert series or sponsors cannot commit to events far enough in advance).

Second, they often have to cough up about $3,000 for “expedited service” because the average processing time is now 11-1/2 months — but there’s very nearly a Catch-22: they’re not allowed to submit the application more than a year in advance. I know of a music camp that had to do a special fundraising campaign last year to raise the expedited service fee so that their advertised guest musician from Nova Scotia could cross the border.

There are a couple more hurdles for the artists to pass through. If their petition is processed and accepted, they have to arrange an in-person interview at a U.S. consulate near them, which can often require an inconvenient journey and expense (for example, Scots have to travel to London or Ireland). Assuming all of these things go right, and all the paperwork is approved, the last official barrier can sometimes be the most harrowing — the U.S. border guard is empowered to decide on the spot whether or not to allow the artist into the country, regardless of visa paperwork, fees paid, and the consulate interview. For a further discussion of this obstacle course, you may like to read this article from NPR.

One additional obstacle currently facing any visiting or immigrating foreigner is the mercurial temperament of our president. Policies can change on a whim, political pressure, or a profitable deal on the table. Not long ago, a Palestinian artist who had been scheduled a year in advance for performances and workshops in New York and elsewhere and had all paperwork in order, was unexpectedly questioned aggressively at the border and placed in ICE detention for a night on a concrete floor before being sent back home. The U.S. venues lost a lot of money refunding tickets, and another attempt at international cultural exchange went down the drain.

The visa situation is worse than it has been for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, when I used to bring in musical guests from overseas for various events, it wasn’t so hard or expensive to arrange for an H1 visa for professional foreign musicians. In those days, the main task was prove that the artist’s abilities were recognized. This required that a foreign musician’s union vouch for the musician so that an American music union could confirm for the government that the foreign artist was legitimate and able to provide a unique contribution.

However, after 9/11, things got much more difficult. A border-control mentality took over, full of suspicion of all who wanted to enter the country. Musicians who had inadequate paperwork were entered on the same watch lists as terrorists. In around 2008, a friend of mine who is a great fiddler from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, planned a one-week trip into the U.S. to visit a violinmaker, stop at several friends’ houses, and possibly share her expertise by playing some music at a house concert or informal workshop. Seeing that it was all very informal, without any announced events, she didn’t get a work visa — in retrospect a bad choice, but her treatment was all out of proportion to the problem.

One border guard took her into a private room, combed through her laptop and phone, and interrogated her for four hours. Another guard did the same with her friend, who was driving.

These border guards are empowered to be judge, jury and executioner, without appeal. In principle, bureaucracy at its best is there to ensure fairness, and a fair outcome in the case of an immigration problem would involve someone impartial who could review evidence and make a decision based on fair guidelines. In my friend’s case, the guard chose not only to refuse her entry but also to ban her for life from ever entering the U.S. The same sentence was handed down to her friend, who was accused of “attempting to smuggle an illegal alien into the country.” This not only kept her out but also the band she played with. (Years later, with intervention by immigration lawyers, the “sentence” was softened and she was able to play once more in the U.S. Not sure how things panned out for her friend, who was also a performer, though not a musician.)

Not long after that incident, I discussed the problem with the premier of Nova Scotia, who happened to be a fiddler himself, and with many others. I organized a petition called CEFTA: Cultural Exchange Free Trade Agreement. The basic idea was that once a qualified musician cleared all hurdles to get a work visa, future visas should be facilitated, building on the previous investigations of the musician’s quality and authenticity (The petition is still online.)

Allowing foreign expert musicians to visit and perform in the U.S is informative, inspiring, educational, entertaining, and functional. Cultural exchange used to be celebrated and a point of pride for the U.S. but has more recently been seriously politicized.

Senators from several border states, such as Vermont and Florida, were interested in my petition because they have populations that share cultures with people across the border (Vermont/Canada, Florida/Cuba). It’s natural for them to want to keep in touch with those cultural ambassadors for concerts, workshops, and community weddings and funerals.

But Congressional action on this topic is tied up in immigration reform, which has always been a sticky and highly politicized issue that Congress tends to avoid.

In addition to creating the petition, I also organized a panel discussion at a 2010 conference for artists, producers, venues, and others involved in enabling performers to cross the U.S/Canada border for tours and other events.

One of the panelists that I arranged for the discussion was an immigration lawyer, and another was a representative of USCIS who came up from Washington DC to join us. During her talk, she described improvements the Obama administration was carrying out to streamline visa applications. But she also pointed out that no matter what work was done in a timely way (the processing time for visas at that time was 95 days, and the expedited fee was about $900), she said there were often rogue border guards from CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) that USCIS could not control. An example of this were a group of border guards who had been transferred from the Arizona border with Mexico to the Maine/Canada border. In one spot where many locals would cross the border weekly to shop at the A&P grocery store on the other side, these new guards treated people as if they were sneaky “illegal aliens”, which disrupted many people’s local routines.

Part of the motivation for work visa regulations stems from fears that foreign performers may take American jobs, but when it comes to musicians, this is mostly quite misguided. Not only do cultural experts open up the perspectives of American listeners, they also teach and inspire their counterparts in the U.S. to learn, teach and inspire Americans in turn, and in this sense, actually create jobs. Blocking competent performers from the U.S. not only deprives American venues and all their employees from income and valuable public offerings, but also pushes motivated learners to spend their money in foreign countries to learn arts they are not allowed access to in their own country. Interestingly, other countries are much more lenient about documentation required for a visa or other acceptable reason for performing, though they may protect certain roles to reserve them for citizens. For example, Canada makes it easy for foreign performers to enter if they have a letter from a venue, as long as it’s not a lounge or bar, which tend to sponsor entertainment jobs on a regular basis.

It's difficult to track the impact of protective policies. The impetus of the most restrictive policies is not just a fear of losing jobs to foreigners but rather the fear of allowing bad actors into the country. Much as I discussed the inherent differences between ICE and police in another article, an obsessive fear of bad actors fosters a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality rather than the innocent-until-proven-guilty approach enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. As a result, extremely restrictive policies tend to be myopic and focused on short-term fears, without a consideration of long-range impacts. One big traditional music festival in Boston used to bring in great Irish musicians every year, but was ended when visas became too difficult and expensive. Part of the “problem” was that many of the great players included in the event were everyday great players from Ireland who worked other jobs by day. They could not afford the time and money to get a visa, and in some cases didn’t have the professional credentials to impress the U.S. agency in charge of processing visas for exceptional artists.

Sadly, the situation today is that most foreign performers are avoiding the high costs, uncertainties and even dangers inherent in visiting America. Few Scottish or other foreign musicians are performing in the U.S. these days. If you do hear of any of them being in your town, don’t miss the chance to see them! Who knows when they’ll be back.