Emma Lazarus’ oft-quoted poem – inscribed at the base of the statue of liberty – has long been an inspirational literary beacon to those trying to get into the United States. "Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.", it says. What it neglects to mention; and what we have discovered over the past four months, is that the sorry condition that the wretched refuse of teeming shores like us are in when we turn up in New York is largely down to the visa application process. If we weren’t tired and poor when we started – we sure as hell are now.
Everything about it costs money – and not petrol to Worcester, a sausage roll and two kit kats money either – serious money. The kind of money that you really ought to be putting into an ISA. You have to pay to file a petition in the US and prove that you have been an international artist for a ‘sustained and substantial’ period of time. This means that you have to frantically email every bulgarian fanzine editor who’s ever printed an appreciative word about you and beg them to send you scans of their publication so as to convince an immigration official (and what kind of person chooses to be an immigration official? Surely it’ll be some NRA meet-attending good ol’ boy motivated by his hatred of mexicans who thinks all music that isn’t by Merle Haggard is essentially treason) that you are worth admitting. Then, you have to pay an additional THOUSAND dollars just to get them to promise to think about it during the next three months, maybe.
You wait and you worry. You buy plane tickets and motel rooms. You try and persuade your record company to give you a bit more money. You experiment with giving up heating. You consider larseny. And then, finally, when it must be too late, they approve you. The democratic institutions of Washington and Lincoln have judged you and found you worthy. It feels good. For a minute or two you strut about thinking ‘Hah, people from school who wouldn’t let me join their Nirvana covers band, who’s the sustained and substantial international artist now, eh?’. Then you phone up the American embassy to make an appointment to apply for the actual visa. It costs £1.20 a minute.
That would be fine, of course, if the appointment service wasn’t entirely staffed by incomprehensible glaswegians who want large amounts of information, the imparting of which requires a mutual compatibility of vowel sounds. They want passport numbers, exact spellings of names and – naturally - credit card details. Credit card details so as to charge you an additional application fee.
They send you a confirmation and instructions. You are required to attend at the given time. You should be early, so as to get through the queue in time. You should not be too early otherwise you’ll make the queue too long. You can’t bring phones or ipods. You must bring all your documents. A list of these documents is on a website. It is up to you to find out where. You must fill in a form. You must not omit any information. You must answer the questions honestly….
If you’ve ever been to America, even on the tourist visa waiver programme, you’ll be familiar with the comedy security questions they ask everybody. Have you ever had AIDS, taken drugs, been in prison; and, of course the one about whether you’ve ever participated in genocide during the thirties. I’m sure that particular question remains on the form solely to weed out the unamericanly sarcastic. It is very very hard not to say yes to it, but you manage. You need a photo. It can’t, however be a normal passport photo, it has to be an extra four millimetres wider. Consequently, it can’t be from a photo booth but has to be done specially – it costs a tenner.
So you finally make it to the embassy. You get there an hour early. You clear security and get a number and hand your application to a woman and have your fingerprints scanned and just when you think its over you are told to sit down and wait for your interview. What? That wasn’t the interview? No. The interview will take place at some point in the next day. Please take a seat. Do we need to pay a seat hire fee, by any chance? No, but if you’d like to avail yourself of a hershey bar they’re for sale for a pound over there…
We’re quite highly strung as bands go. By this point Julia and I are in a state of near critical tension. We are still, but if you look closely at us, we are vibrating like magnets pushed together. We get mild whiplash from snapping our heads up to look at the board that displays the appointment numbers every time one is mumbled over the tannoy. I spot AA Gill (the food critic and perhaps closest real-world equivalent of Ratatouille’s Anton Ego) waiting across the room. It is little comfort to note that even he is looking a little bit apprehensive.
Finally you’re called and you go to the window where Uncle Sam waits to decide your fate. You expect a grilling. A polygraph. Maybe he’ll test you for TB and change your surname to the name of sicilian village you were born in. Maybe he’ll just take one look and laugh: YOU in America? Fuck No.
‘Hi, guys, where you playin’?’
‘er… New York and then driving down to Austin for South-By-Southwest.’
‘Cool, what do you play?’
‘Um… guitar.’
‘OK, that’s all approved.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure.’
‘So, what now?’
‘Go see the courier and arrange to have your passport sent back to you.’
It costs twenty-five quid.
But, at least, it feels like a done deal at this point. You’ve done everything right – all you need to do is sit back, pack, and wait for the passports to show up. What is it with these fly by night bands who you always read about cancelling US dates because of Visa issues? Amateurs! It’s all fine. Uncle Sam said so.
So it gets to the weekend. You’re due to fly on Thursday. It’s fine. Still no passports on Monday. Fine. You phone the courier. Is it fine? Yep. It’s fine. Tuesday. You phone again. They don’t have them yet, but they can arrange a next day delivery when they get them. It’s fine.
Wednesday. You phone the courier. You phone the embassy. They say to email. You email. They send an email back that says they don’t respond to emails. You phone the courier, the embassy, they say to phone the passport office. You phone the passport office. The passport office takes your date of birth, name, address, eye colour, sexual history and medical records – then they ask what you want. They don’t have anything to do with visas, sorry. You phone the courier, the embassy, they say to email again but this time to put some specific text in the subject line. You email, putting a some specific text in the subject line. They email back: Your visa is awaiting petition verification in Washington and will not be issued today.
It is not fine.
You have no passports or visas and you can’t get on your flight. This really, really, really, really sucks.
The company who sponsored your petition say that they don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on, but that you’ve probably been flagged by a CIA computer as having been involved in running guns to Nicaragua during the sixties and that there’s nothing anyone can do.
Did I mention we were highly strung? The last four days have been medievally cruel. We’ve paced rooms, shot innocent pixel-people in Grand Theft Auto, been on 3am ASDA safaris and sat helplessly by the door for hours staring at the reception bars on horribly silent telephones and sobbing into our cursory, untasted meals. Finally, today – Friday – we heard that the passports were on their way. This means that we can go to SXSW – though not New York, and not embark on the Kerouac and Cassady Roadtrip through the Deep South that we’d been planning – but we are going. As god is our witness, we are getting on that plane.
Tired, Poor, huddled and wretched… that big green french bitch had better be pleased to see us.
http://www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk
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