The little klezmer band that changed the way the US issues visas

PALO ALTO, California — A US immigration agency has expanded its determining criteria for giving visas to visiting artists, after the rejection of a Latin-klezmer fusion band from Argentina brought to light the office’s narrow definition of the term “culturally unique.”

With the decision, the agency has belatedly admitted that in our globalized world, “culturally unique” art is just as likely to be of a fusion or hybrid genre as it is to be a purely traditional one, opening America’s gates to a number of musicians who don’t strictly stick to the sheet music of their forefathers.

On May 15, US Citizenship and Immigration Services’s Administrative Appeals Office issued a binding precedent decision addressing the term “culturally unique” and its significance in the adjudication of petitions for performing artists and entertainers, all due to a little-known klezmer band out of Buenos Aires.

It is not unusual for cultural organizations in the United States, like Los Angeles’s Skirball Cultural Center, to run into difficulty in bringing foreign performers into the country. They are at the mercy of the USCIS, which determines whether artists meet the criteria for receiving a P-3 nonimmigrant visa, which allows “culturally unique” groups or individuals to enter the country to perform, teach, or coach temporarily.

Although it had not traditionally had too much trouble in procuring such visas for its visiting acts, the Skirball Cultural Center did encounter a serious glitch in November 2009. That’s when the director of USCIS’s California Service Center denied Orquestra Kef, a Buenos Aires-based klezmer fusion band a visa to come headline the center’s big Latin-flavored “Fiesta Hanukkah” program. The agency claimed that the group’s music, which fuses klezmer with tango and other Argentinean sounds, was not traditional enough to be “culturally unique.”

“We were very disappointed,” recalled Vice President and Director of Programs Jordan Peimer in a phone interview with The Times of Israel. While he and his colleagues were anticipating a fun event, as the name of the band would suggest (“kef” is Hebrew for “fun”), they instead found themselves in a bind. The center decided that the show had to go on, even without Orquestra Kef. Little did it know that two and a half years after that winter holiday season, it would be this specific denial that would make USCIS see the light about who should be eligible for a P-3 visa.

“The decision clarifies that a ‘culturally unique’ style of art or entertainment is not limited to traditional art forms, but may include artistic expression that is deemed to be a hybrid or fusion of more than one culture or region,” USCIS stated in a press release. Such “decisions selected and designated as precedent by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security with the Attorney General’s concurrence, are legally binding on DHS components responsible for enforcing immigration laws in all proceedings involving the same issue,” it continued. This would indicate that the country should be more welcoming to Orquestra Kef and similar groups from now on.

The truth is, however, that Orquestra Kef did not have to wait until now to be eligible for a P-3 visa. “The denial was reversed a month later in December 2009,” Peimer stated. It had nothing to do with a complaint or appeal on the part of the Skirball Cultural Center (it filed neither), but rather with some negative press.

Following the publication in the Wall Street Journal of a story on the matter of government bureaucrats passing cultural and artistic judgments, titled, “Bring Us Your Tired, Your Weak, But Only If They’re ‘Culturally Unique’” on December 11, 2009, the USCIS decided on its own to do an administrative review of the denial. “I’d never before heard of them appealing their own decision,” Peimer noted.

‘The recent decision was a new interpretation of the rules based on the facts of the Orquestra Kef case’

“The recent decision was a new interpretation of the rules based on the facts of the Orquestra Kef case,” he explained. So now, other fusion artists will technically be eligible to receive the same privilege as the Argentinean klezmer band. “The implications for the field are very, very large,” Peimer said. “We all hope it will make obtaining artists’ visas easier, but we will just need to wait and see how realistic this will be,” he cautioned.

Although Peimer said the center has no immediate plans to schedule an appearance by Orquestra Kef, he offered the he is “certain this decision will make it easier to bring them back.” He insisted that they are truly culturally unique artists. “Their fusion of klezmer with tango and Argentinean sounds is absolutely the sound of Jewish Buenos Aires,” he asserted. “How more culturally specific can you get than Jewish music of Latin America?” he was quoted as asking in the Wall Street Journal article.

“The most interesting music is coming from hybridized cultures,” Peimer said, and he suggested that this new USCIS decision is a reflection of the current government’s recognition of this fact.

“This decision is emblematic of a desire to move away from cultural isolationism,” he said. “I believe that the Obama Administration is in favor of cultural exchange. This is a real symbol that the government has recognized something that was getting to be a real problem under of the Bush Administration, and it is trying to solve it.”