letter from Les Barker posted today on Ausfolk mailing list
Ausfolk@folkalliance.org.au
http://mail.folkalliance.org.au/mailman/listinfo/ausfolk_folkalliance.
org.au.

originally from a US radio list.
................


Date:    Thu, 26 Oct 2006 12:03:12 -0500
From:    Paul Stamler
Subject: Les Barker denied a visa

Hi folks:

In yet another act of rank stupidity, the Department of Homeland Security,
which now contains the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has (in
practical terms) denied a visa to poet/humorist Les Barker for his November
tour. Their grounds? Astonishing, if you're familiar with Les's work: they
stated that he was "not sufficiently culturally unique".

I am not making this up.

An excerpt from a letter Les sent me: "Homeland Security haven't said no at
this point; what they've done is to issue a statement of intent to deny; it
went to Godfrey Daniels, one of the venues on the tour and said they were
minded to deny me entry because I'm not sufficiently culturally unique. I
immediately emailed MIke Space, the promoter, a pile of reviews which
specifically addressed the point, all of which had been part of the huge
pile I'd sent over to my agent at the very start of the process. So Mike can
effectively contest the letter, but as we've been told by the man at Traffic
Control, the agency who've dealt with my visa, it will then take Homeland
Security 2 weeks to add the information to my file, a further 2 weeks for
someone to open the file again and start looking at it, then however long it
takes for someone to arrive at a decision, after which - if the answer's
yes - I have to begin the UK end of the process which might be another
couple of weeks, which takes us at best into December. Too late."

Quicksilver and Andy Irvine have also been denied on the same grounds. More
from Les: "I don't know how much you
know of the history of the visa process, but it's nothing to do with finding
out whether you're a good musician, and certainly nothing to do with
security, and everything to do with discouraging you from ever wanting to do
it again. It's an economic measure. Every eighteen months or so, they
rearrange the hoops you have to jump through to stop it becoming routine;
this is the latest rearrangement of the hoops. There will be an outcry.
Things will improve in a while. Then it'll be time to rearrange the hoops
again. I've been going through them for 12 years and it's always been awful,
and apparently it was just as awful for years before that."

And: "The thing that's enraged me most of all over the years is the Premium
Fee. Back in 2001, some months before 9/11, it suddenly started taking the
INS over 7 months to process applications. As you can't apply more than 6
months before the
first gig, this was an obvious problem. And how did they solve it? By
introducing a system whereby you can pay an extra 1000 dollars and be moved
to the front of the queue. You'd be appalled to get that treatment from a
corrupt customs officer in say, the Republic of Equatorial Guinea. But in
the US it's official policy."

I have my own suspicions, which tell me that the effective visa denial may
be related to the content of some of Les's more serious pieces. No -- you
don't think -- but they wouldn't do that! They might waterboard somebody (as
Cheney has admitted, according to this morning's news) but they'd never deny
entry to a poet because they didn't like his verses. Would they?

In any case, whether it's because of Les's politics or "insufficient
cultural uniqueness", the government of the United States shows its contempt
for the the rest of the world when it keeps the world's artists from
performing here. And the rest of the world, increasingly, returns the
contempt.

I know what I'll be playing on this Sunday's program.

Peace,
Paul

__