Home > The Border Line > Archives > 2008 > June > 19
Thursday, June 19, 2008
More visas for fashion models
Tall, thin and beautiful foreigners could get their own visa category under legislation moving on Capitol Hill.
Weiner contends that the models are vital to the fashion industry, particularly in his home state of New York and that the current system forces models to compete for visas with high tech workers and others.
“A simple way to create and protect jobs in New York City is to fix the glitch in the law that has lumped high tech workers with fashion models,” said Weiner, who is considered a possible future contender for mayor of the Big Apple.
The measure was recently approved by the House Judiciary Committee by a vote of 20-3.
Currently, fashion models have to compete with engineers and other high tech workers for H-1B visas which are given to well educated foreign citizens.
Despite intense lobbying by power house companies such as Microsoft, the mandated cap on H-1B visas has remained at 65,000 for years. Another 20,000 are given to foreign citizens with advanced degrees from American universities.
This year, requests for the permits reached an all-time high with nearly 163,000 applications received in the first five days the process was open. After that, requests were sent back.
In fiscal year 2007, fashion models received 349 of the H-1B visas, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In fiscal year 2006, they received 438. Earlier in the decade, fashion models received about twice as many.
The visas allow companies to bring in foreign workers for up to three years, with an option to renew for another three. Bruce Morrison, a former Congressman who lobbies for a coalition of fashion industry businesses, said that photo shoots and fashion shows will move overseas if companies can’t get the models they want in the United States. As a result, U.S. photographers, make up artists, support staff, and others will lose money, he said. In addition, he said that American models lose the chance of working at events that move overseas. “This is about millions of dollars that would go abroad that will be spent in America,” Morrison said. He also described the legislation as a “technical correction” because models should have never been included in the H-1B category. The measure would create a new subcategory of visa, called the P-4. It specifies that the visa would apply to fashion models involved in “events or productions which have a distinguished reputation” or that are performed by organizations with a record of using “prominent modeling talent.” P visas are also used for athletes and entertainers who enter the United States for short periods of time. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates lower levels of immigration, said he wasn’t concerned about the possibility of the new visa category for models because it would affect a small number of people and does not provide permanent legal residency. In addition, he said it made sense for fashion models to be removed from the H-1B category. Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, said that Weiner might consider an easier way to get more visas for fashion models — making them exempt from the H-1B cap. Such legislation would have a chance of passing quietly as an amendment to a larger bill, he said. However, any immigration legislation faces tough scrutiny in the current political environment, he added. For example, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., has been trying to pass a measure to increase visas for low skilled non-agricultural workers with no success. Papademetriou, who helped draft the 1990 legislation that created H-1B visas, also said that lawmakers never envisioned that fashion models would use them. “I can’t think of a single conversation where somebody said, ‘what about fashion models?’” he said.
