NEWS & POLITICS extraordinary burden IMMIGRATION

By HANNAH EDGAR

After Rui Sha graduated from the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019, she explored options to stay in the U.S. beyond the end of her student visa. An interdisciplinary artist, Sha felt the choice was more or less obvious: she would apply for the O-1B visa, the only visa o ered specifically to artists, musicians, and entertainers living in the United States.

But as Sha soon learned, a visa intended for artists doesn’t mean it was built with the realities of artists in mind. Legally, O-1B holders must derive their entire income from work related to their artistic practice. To state the obvious, making a living working in the arts full-time is impossible for many artists, especially those just starting their careers and without other means of financial support. Those who work outside U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) restrictions risk losing their visa and getting deported.

Sha was one of the lucky ones: At the time she applied for the O-1B, she was in the run- ning for a part-time job at the Evanston Art Center, where she still works. But she still freelances to make ends meet, and when her application stalled for half a year, Sha had to defer her work for the Evanston Art Center until USCIS finally granted her the visa. Between COVID-19-related travel interruptions and disruptions caused by her visa status, Sha was unable to return to China to be with her mother, who was dying of cancer.

Now, with less than a year until she must reapply for the O-1B, Sha again finds herself in limbo. She is distraught at the thought of returning to China. But the O-1B, meant to be a ticket to employment for artists in their respective fields, hasn’t opened the doors for her that she’d hoped it would. In fact, quite the opposite: Sha suspects that her visa status has scared o other potential employers who assume, wrongly, they’ll have to sponsor her visa, as employers do for an H-1B visa.

“I feel like my life has been paused by this visa,” Sha says.

Sha’s story is a familiar one for many immigrant artists in the U.S. Also called the “extraordinary ability visa,” O-1 visas—O-1A, for the sciences, education, business, or athletics, or O-1B, for the arts—allow individuals to stay in the U.S. for a maximum of three years, at which point they must reapply. But O visas are notorious for being both widely misunderstood and having a high standard of proof for qualification—standards which remain stringent no matter how many times one has successfully applied.

Many of the O-1B visa’s qualifications in particular can seem divorced from the day-to-day realities of artists in the U.S. USCIS requires proof that an artist has “received, or been nominated for, a significant national or inter- national award.” (Examples of those awards, per USCIS: an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, or a Directors Guild Award.) If applicants can’t provide that, USCIS requires at least three forms of evidence pointing to other qualifications, such as proof of further employment, “national or international” recognition of their achievements, recommendation letters from experts in their field, and their ability to “command a high salary”—a rarity for anyone working in the arts.

The O-1B’s restrictions also make government bureaucrats judges of artistic quality. Before applying to the O-1B, Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel, an actress who is both an ensemble member and artistic producer at Teatro Vista, applied for the EB-1 visa, or “Einstein visa,” which gives successful applicants access to a green card. Her application was replete with career accolades, from her Non-Equity Je Award win (for the title role in Lela and Co., at Steep Theatre) to appearances on TV shows like Chicago Med, The Chi, and Empire. By the time she submitted her application, Gonzalez-Cadel’s file was “this thick,” says her husband, composer Tomás Gueglio, showing a two-inch space between his fingers.

But Gonzalez-Cadel says USCIS rejected her application, contending, in part, that the Je s weren’t a “nationally recognized” award, “like the Tonys.”

“I live in Chicago, and the Joseph Je erson Award is the nationally recognized award body of the Chicago theater scene. I cannot win a Tony because I do not live in New York,” Gonzalez-Cadel says. “Specificity like this is what the system lacks.”

After being rejected for the EB-1, Gonzalez-Cadel and Gueglio successfully acquired O-1 visas. Gonzalez-Cadel quickly learned that successful visa applications were ones which translated artistic achievements into qualitative data points for USCIS—metrics that missed the richness of her portfolio but would be “easy to understand for someone who is not part of the art world.”

“I’ve started being like, ‘This is the percentage of Latina Equity actors getting lead roles,’ so it’s easier for them to understand [my accomplishments] from a bureaucratic point of view. . . . Basically, how do you make artistic success a formula?” she says.

USCIS also recommends that applicants submit clips about their work published in “major” media or newspapers. Setting aside the fact that USCIS declines to define “major media,” press coverage is a dubious yardstick of quality when most publications have made significant cuts to their culture coverage in recent years. Lori Waxman, an art critic who frequently writes for the Chicago Tribune , attempts to address this shortfall with her public-service-meets-performance-art project 60 WRD/MIN , in which Waxman writes micro-reviews for artists on a first-come, firstserved basis. Most artists aren’t so lucky, and many bristle at the idea that their work needs press coverage to be legitimized in the eyes of USCIS.

“Sometimes you just feel like you’re doing [a project] for the media coverage. You’re not genuinely expressing yourself,” Sha says. Gonzalez-Cadel, too, finds it “emotionally taxing” to tie her self-worth as an artist to the O-1B’s metrics. Yet that’s what the visa forces artists to do, again and again.

“For me, a successful day is if I write three pages of the script I’m working on,” Gonzalez-Cadel says. “That is not a successful day in USCIS’s book. Because there’s no output.”

On a sunny day in June, Jiaming You, a recent MFA graduate from SAIC, lets me into a nondescript gray building in the South Loop. They live and work here, leasing the space from a former professor. You sifts through their recent paintings—fleshy acrylics, many on synthetic, semitranslucent yupo paper—and tapes some to the wall for us to observe together.

Ambiguously gendered bodies dominate You’s artwork. So does the casual violence of spectator sports. In Mercy and Watcher (both 2022), the viewer is transported to the front row of a boxing match. A more recent work, Face-Off (2023), depicts two eerily faceless hockey players brawling atop agitated streaks of color.

“You watch these people fight, if you can afford the ticket. Money is the real winner,” You muses.

For the O-1B, too, “money is your passport,” says You. They’re currently in the process of applying for the O-1 for the first time, having remained in the U.S. through an Optional Practical Training (OPT) status tied to their F-1 student visa and, now, a B-2 visa. You thinks their prospects might be good for the O-1B: Recently, they’ve been able to live on their savings and lean into making art full-time. Their work has attracted a handsome amount of press attention, and they have two shows upcoming at W. Gallery, in September and October.

After graduating from SAIC, You spent a short stint working as an art handler to make ends meet, a taxing and male-dominated job that came with ups and downs. But for all its frustrations, the job was in their field and thus legally permissible under OPT, which operates under the same field-specific work guidelines as the O-1B. For most artists living here on a visa, that has to be good enough.

“I cannot just get a job at a co ee shop or bakery. That’s illegal for me,” says Chih-Jou Cheng, a movement artist and puppeteer.

This year, Cheng is hard at work on a largescale project on the immigrant experience with Dawn Theatre Project, which she recently cofounded; the company will host workshops exploring migration in English, Spanish, and Mandarin at UrbanTheater Company on August 19 and 26. Cheng also recently performed