Thursday, April 03, 2008
Visas - Artists
New York Times: "as the House of Representatives voted this week to speed up the visa approval process for some foreign artists and entertainers, the heads of arts organization said attention was finally being paid to the real problem: the time, money and complexity involved in getting visas for lower-profile artists, including dancers, singers, musicians and actors."
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2 comments:
This is a really depressing article because it's a problem that I don't see getting resolved any time soon. With so much else going on, expediating the visa process isn't exactly high on politicians' lists of things to worry about. Also, as the article pointed out, the falling value of the dollar will only make matters worse. I feel like making international travel easier would ultimately make our world better and safer, but we get so narrow minded and short sighted that Americans want to live in an "iron fortress" like the article said. It's upsetting because this means that when we are working it's going to be even more difficult to collaborate with anyone outside of the country and to do the kind of work we want to do.
It is really too bad to see how many problems arise from Customs/Immigration/Department of Homeland Security being to tight/paranoid with people entering the country, and this article is just one example. It is especially bad for artists because of the tight schedule and budget, but I know that Google also has had problems getting people into the country. When these issues come up, it is good to see that politicians are trying to work on it, but I think that they are just trying to fix the problem that got bad PR, and they aren't really fixing the horribly broken system. Other countries (such as the EU) make it very easy — why shouldn't it be the same in the US?
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