The detention of cartoonist Becky Burke by U.S. immigration officials is a potent reminder of the complexity and rigor of U.S. visa laws. We’re relieved to learn that her family has been able to secure legal assistance – we were reaching out for help as well – and that the massive amount of media attention has led ICE to consider reducing her time in detention.
These glimpses of hope, however, should not distract us from the fact that visa law and policy remains a significant issue for everyone in the international comic arts community who is planning to travel to the U.S. – and, conversely, for U.S. visa holders travelling abroad. This is particularly important to remember in convention season, especially for creatives going to cons to sell their art or get gigs.
To see why, let’s take a closer look at last week’s incident. The detention was indeed a stunning expression of the U.S. immigration system’s ongoing carceral turn, but the legal grounds used to justify this action reflect a longstanding yet counter-intuitive aspect of visa law in multiple countries.
According to multiple news reports, Burke managed the expense of her four-month North American trip with the help of a host-family cultural exchange service in which the traveller receives free housing in return for doing light housework. At first, using this service while traversing the U.S. did not appear to be a problem, until a Canadian border official refused to allow her to enter that country as well, evidently on the grounds that helping host families required obtaining a work visa. The Canadian official sent her back to U.S. border control to get the right paperwork, but the U.S. official was likewise said to find this international exchange arrangement to be a visa violation. The controversial detention by ICE and potential removal followed.
It’s easy to see why this came as such a shock. For millennia proportionality has been a defining quality of justice, and imprisonment and expulsion does not seem to be a fair response to what even the Canadian official treated as a relatively innocuous – and easily correctable – mix-up in paperwork. Moreover, cultural exchanges in which an itinerant traveller stays with host families are a mainstay of the international experience, so much so that it’s natural to assume that they are consistent with the types of visas that countless people use to see the world.
And yet, with the increasingly draconian system of U.S. immigration and visa law, this unfortunate situation highlights how certain transactions, regardless of how noncommercial or outside the realm of a formal employment relationship they might seem, have nonetheless been used to justify enforcement actions against travellers with tourist, business, or student visas.
In my next post, we’ll take a closer look at these widely used visas and what they mean for international creators who want to sell their work in the U.S.
OBLIGATORY LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This is an educational overview, not legal advice – consult your attorney for legal advice tailored to your specific situation!