Hayden Rivas '24 | Photo by Lee Gumbs

By Zachary Whittenburg for Dance Magazine

If you ask a U.S. immigration expert what’s changed over the past year for performing artists, you’ll get 14 bullet points linked to text-heavy web pages. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “With the new regime in the U.S., new challenge­s have arisen,” says Matthew Covey, executive director of Tamizdat, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that facilitates and advocates for international mobility and cultural exchange.

For artists entering or exiting the country for professional purposes, some of these challenges stem from clearly stated updates to fees, forms, and policies. But there are also greater degrees of uncertainty embedded within application and approval processes, making it harder to predict—and to budget time and money for—the widening range of potential outcomes. Even after an individual or group receives the approval it needs to work in the U.S., “it is clear that changes in rules and enforcement significantly impact them in new ways,” Covey says. “Right now, it’s anybody’s guess what the current administration will do.”

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