Happy July 4th (and Pride)!

Pride Parade on 5th Avenue last Sunday.

State Department Visa and Passport Systems Back Online

Following the technological issues they experienced over the last few weeks, the State Department reports that as of last Friday all visa-issuing US Embassies and Consulates abroad are now back online. They are scheduling visa interviews as well as issuing nonimmigrant and immigrant visas. While consular posts may be still experiencing problems with some online immigrant visa application forms, which are still being fixed, they have been working to clear the extensive backlog, which they state will be done this week (which is perhaps a bit optimistic).

What happened?
A biometric hardware error brought the entire system down on June 7, preventing US Embassies and Consulates around the world from processing and issuing hundreds of thousands of visa stamps. Consular posts receive approximately 50,000 visa applications a day, and thus the downtime severely backlogged the system and caused major delays for many international travelers.

Who was able to obtain visas?
During the outage, with limited systems functionality, the State Department promised to prioritize visas for humanitarian reasons and also for foreign agricultural workers as part of the government's H-2A visa program. It was this latter group of workers that farmers especially needed as the summer harvest began. North Carolina, the top employer of seasonal workers under the H-2A visa program, was facing severe worker shortages and loss of revenue given the extensive delays in issuing visas.

"It's a crisis," Jason Resnick, general counsel for the Western Growers Association, said to the Wall Street Journal about the workers not being issued the visas. Crops affected by the shortage of foreign workers include berries, cherries, peaches, corn, vegetables, and tobacco. The Wall Street Journal reports:

In most cases the stranded workers’ motel bills in Mexico are being paid by the farmers or the U.S. agents who contracted them, according to the visa program’s requirements. Agents said some stranded workers, who typically travel to the border from far flung villages, are being approached by people-smugglers offering to spirit them over the border at a price. Coming at the start of the busiest season, 'it’s a desperate situation for growers,' said Libby Whitley, president of MAS Labor, a Virginia-based agency that sources 10,000 seasonal workers each year for U.S. agriculture. 'They have to get the stuff off trees and fields or you don’t have it anymore,' she said.

With delays costing farmers in California an estimated $500,000 to $1 million per day, the State Department reports that more than 3,750 temporary seasonal workers have been issued new visas in Mexico since last week, and they are stating that all pending H-2 visas that were delayed have been issued this week.  

Who didn't get visas?
The systems outage caused major problems for many international travelers and performers to the US. Dutch theatre troupe Dood Paard had to cancel its Botox Angels production, set to run over Pride weekend in New York City, after they were unable to secure visas for its cast. International students were unable to attend the US National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia, a prestigious month-long educational program for high-school graduates from around the world.

As for the sporting world, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) had to cancel several high-profile fights scheduled for the UFC Fight Night event in Hollywood since twelve foreign fighters were unable to obtain visas. Players and staff with the Bayern Munich football club, which had planned a visit to the US to “crack the American market,” were unable to obtain visas and had to cancel their trip. Matthias Sammer, director of sport at Bayern Munich, called it a "shame" and said he hoped they could make it later.

Musicians were hit especially hard. Nigerian jazz singer-songwriter King Sunny Ade had to cancel his entire US tour due to the visa problem, and Chinese concert pianist Fei-Fei Dong also had to cancel performances. Peruvian electronic psychedelic band Dengue Dengue Dengue! were also not able to get visas in time, Australian pop band the Veronicas had to cancel their US tour, and Japanese heavy metal band Crossfaith had to cancel part of theirs. India's Barmer Boys, Sufi folk musicians from Rajasthan, India, also had to cancel their US tour. Even diplomats who needed to visit the UN headquarters and financial institutions in New York for "urgent negotiations" also faced visa delays because of the system outage.

Now that the systems are back up, we are hopeful the State Department and consular posts will work through the backlog and start issuing those visas. Because, on behalf of concertgoers across this great land, we don't want to miss anymore great international performances. And we definitely don't want a repeat from last year when Harry Potter was unable to enter the US because of a (different) systems glitch!

Equal Dignity

"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."

- Anthony Kennedy
   Majority Opinion
   Obergefell v. Hodges
   The Supreme Court of the United States

Lizzie B and Lady Liberty

The view from the top of One World Trade Center. (Photo by Mark Uhlemann.)

One World Trade Center, which opened in October 2014, is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, and on top of this building is the recently opened One World Observatory™, which provides unique and amazing panoramic views of New York City and surrounding waters and areas. Yesterday Lizzie B and her fiancé took one of the sky pod elevators to the 102nd floor in under sixty seconds. They admired the incredible views, and for a few seconds, Lizzie B locked eyes with Lady Liberty. It was a special moment.

Harper's: "Displaced in the D.R.: A Country Strips 210,000 of Citizenship"

Photo by Daniel Loncarevic/iStock/ Getty Images

After stripping citizenship from over two hundred thousand Dominicans, many of Haitian descent, the Dominican Republic has threatened mass deportation for those who do not register with the government to obtain legal status. The threats of deportation come after years of anti-Haitian discrimination and a documented history of violence against Haitian immigrants culminating in 2013 when the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal, the nation's highest court, revoked citizenship retroactively to 1929 for all Dominicans with undocumented foreign parents even if they had been born in the Dominican Republic. The ruling, which became known as "the Sentence," effectively rendered 210,000 Dominicans stateless, most of whom are of Haitian descent. Juliana Deguis Pierre, who was one of the plaintiffs in the suit against the government that in the end backfired and led to her loss of citizenship, said the Sentence "paralyzed her life," as it meant she could not legally work, marry, open a bank account, get a driver’s license, vote, or register for high school or university. "I'm nobody in my own country," she told Harper's at the time.

In response to severe international criticism of the Sentence—including many who compared it to Hitler's stripping citizenship from Jews in Germany in the 1930s—the Dominican government issued a presidential decree for a "regularization" plan for undocumented immigrants. The plan allowed for anyone who immigrated to the Dominican Republic before October 2011 to apply for regular migratory status, and afterwards citizenship. While the plan did provide options for undocumented Dominicans to avoid deportation, critics of the plan noted the difficult obstacles in applying, including burdensome documentation requirements and the need to apply in-person at designated offices far from most Haitian communities. Those who did not apply by June 2015 would be deported.

Now that the June deadline has passed, with hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants still reportedly unregistered, it remains unclear if mass deportations will take place. The Dominican government has not stated if it will extend the deadline for registration, has repeatedly denied any plans for mass deportations, and has stated that as a sovereign nation it has the right to enact and enforce its own immigration policies as it sees fit.

In the meantime, many continue to speak out against the Dominican government's deportation plans. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke this past Sunday from Washington Heights, the Manhattan neighborhood with a large Dominican population. "It is clearly an illegal act," Mayor de Blasio said. "It is an immoral act. It is a racist act by the Dominican government. And it’s happening because these people are black. And it cannot be accepted."

Voices of Color

"The times now seem to be evolving with voices of color. All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people — a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it, big questions. All this is swirling in the air.”

- Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Latino
 poet laureate of the United States  
 The Washington Post

Wine Friday

Photo by Carolyn Szaiff.

After a long week of filing cases and doing our best to deal with the visa issuance delays at US Embassies/Consulates wordwide, we were able to relax a bit with a colorful array of wines: a Sauvignon blanc, a classic rosé, a rosé cider (oooh, exciting), and a Tempranillo. Also we had some cheesy bread—because it's so good.