US wages indiscriminate visa war

By Vicki Woods

04/01/06 "The Telegraph" -- -- In a tale of our terrorised times, the Hallé Orchestra has regretfully had to cancel its planned American mini-tour next year because it can't afford the visas. It was going to play two concerts in 2007, one of them in New York at the Lincoln Centre, but the fees aren't worth the visa expenses.

The 80 members of the orchestra plus 20 support staff, all based in Manchester, have been told they each need to apply for a visa in person at the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. Nor can they just catch the dawn train to Euston en masse and turn up at mid-morning. Each person has to make his or her own separate appointment first, by phone - on that nightmare line that costs £1.30 a minute.

The Hallé's chief executive, John Summers, reckons it would cost £45,000 to pay for 100 visas ($100 each - about £65), return fares from Manchester Piccadilly to Euston and overnight hotel bills. He says: "The palaver is mind-blowing," which it is. He wondered why it couldn't be done in Manchester, but the US embassy's consul-general said no way - his computers need high-speed lines to send the "biometric data" back to Washington. "We are all paying a cost because of terrorism," he said. (Yes. Except for Americans travelling to Britain.)

Russell Jones, director of the Association of British Orchestras, complains that "it's not a level playing field. Journalists and sports people do not have to go through these hoops". I have hoops news for Mr Jones. Twelve years before the World Trade Centre was smashed to pieces on September 11, I started working for an American magazine, which meant frequent trips to New York or Los Angeles. I thought I'd get a visa to save the bother of filling in that tedious visa-waiver form on the plane. I went to the US embassy, breezed in through the swing-doors (fancy, eh?) and asked where visas might be. Downstairs? OK.

I hadn't made an appointment, but waited less than an hour. The bloke who saw me was stiff and officious, veering towards hostile. He said I needed an I-visa - had I brought an official letter from the head of the foreign media organisation that employed me? No - it was an American magazine, therefore not "foreign" in his terms.

He said that would not be an I-visa, but an O-visa, which was for aliens who had a "unique or outstanding skill that could not be supplied at this time by any citizen of the United States". He said: "That would be you, huh?" Well, erm. "You need an official letter from your American company stating as fact that your skills are unique. You could also use maybe six or 10 back-up letters from outstanding, established people in your kinda business endorsing that fact." Good grief.

I thought: I'm not leaving here without a bloody visa, and withdrew back to the waiting-room to wait for a different person. She was just as snotty about aliens, but she had a weak point: celeb-spotting. Who was the last person I interviewed? MADONNA? Oh, my! Do tell! I told at length and she gave me both an I-visa and a B-l business visa as well ("Journalists can use these to get in and out quicker, in places like the South.") Fine - except that both ran out in 2000.

After the Department of Homeland Security rolled out the Patriot Act, the press could not use business visas any more: they were deemed too loose and insecure for wriggly journalists who might slyly use their press credentials to get worrisome access. And a new paragraph, in tiny print, appeared on the Visa Waiver forms, saying that every UK citizen could use the waiver except for members of terrorist organisations, former Nazis and journalists.

My unique and outstanding skills don't include a) law-breaking or b) lying in your face. I had to do both on a visa-waiver. "What's your business, ma'am?" Oh, I'm just a home-maker, you know. Long silence, into which I would babble about vegetable gardens and children.

Last time I went, I'd forgotten to sort my lie out, so when the man snapped: "Your reason for visiting New York?" I blushed. He saw me blush. After an aeon, I said, OK, look - I was coming to New York to - ah, to - erm, to - to HAVE DINNER WITH A GIRLFRIEND. After another aeon, he said: "Ma'am, I believe you. But all I gotta say is I hope your husband does as well, when you get back home. Have a nice evening." Tony Blair, who has just returned from explaining his foreign policy in two (so far) much-admired speeches to the four corners of the world, never has to stand in front of US immigration like the rest of us explaining his reasons for entry. It's lazy, stupid and clearly wrong of me to blame Tony (and his mucker George Bush) for my difficulties with American travel. But I do. Who else is there?

Well, now I've read Blair's carefully composed foreign-policy speech (Part 1 of 3), I see exactly who is to blame. Me, and wha's like me. People who "sit in the commentator's seat" and "preach benign inactivity almost as a matter of principle" instead of winning the war for democracy against violence.

People who thought that a pre-emptive war on Iraq was a godawful idea and would stir up a hornet's nest. People who don't understand that "Islamist extremism" is as bad as a) fascism and b) communism, and must be smacked down hard, first by invading Afghanistan, then by invading Iraq and finally - I reckon - by invading Iran. People who will end up without even a passport, never mind a visa, because they won't - damn well won't - get an ID card, ever.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2006.