But it is, isn’t it? If you have a special work permit to do one thing and then you do some extra, then you are violating the terms of your visa.
Being someone who lives and works on a visa, I see this as more of a warning that Immigration is extra strict this year and people need to be very aware of the limitations of the visa and the risks that someone will come looking for them.
What makes this look bad is that it’s following directly on the heels of the “don’t do anything to tarnish the event” bit.
Hmmm… My Chinese visa lets me work for other companies/people provided I have the permission of my visa enabler, my employer. Couldn’t SXSW also grant permission for outside work, or are Chinese work visas actually more liberal than US visas?
I’m guessing that you are on a longer term visa, as opposed to a short-term artist/performer visa, which usually has stricter limitations.
As for China, I’ve only had short-term business visas - very restictive. Does yours allow you to do any kind of work? In Japan, spouse visa and permanent resident visas allow any kind of work. Other work visas are restricted in the kind of work allowed. (ie, a missionary can’t start working as a waiter part-time.)
I’m on a year-length visa. As to what kind of work I’m allowed to do, hard to be certain, there is some ambiguity.
The visa itself says that I’m here to work, and doesn’t specify the job.
My foreign expert certificate says that I’m an English Language teacher. Now, it says that specifically in relation to my current company, in other words, that’s what I do there. It doesn’t say anything about what I can do elsewhere, if anything.
My contract is what says that I can work for others, provided I get permission. This is part of the standard foreign worker contract, so it should be true for all. This particular clause doesn’t specify that my secondary work has to be in the same field. Of course, it is possible that it is not stated because it is up to my employer to make certain that I don’t take on “inappropriate” work.
This is totally unsurprising. Years and years SXSW have proven that they can be absolute dickheads about this type of thing. I live right next to ground zero, so I know.
Early on, many of my friends here in Japan found that 1) despite what the company led us to believe, they didn’t ‘own’ our visas and we could jump ship, and take our visas with us to a new employer. And many found out the hard way, that 2) that new employer or other part-time / gig roles had to be the same classification of work. Relative to the US, Japan is pretty lenient about this, or at least it has been. Enforcement is always subject to change.
A quick google search tells me the Chinese work visa is one broad category (and one of only 12 visa categories in China, whereas Japan has 27, including many specific to authorized type of work).
The key point I want to make in reference to the SXSW contract is that, despite other possible dickishness, warning people about doing non-authorized work in the current climate doesn’t seem like an entirely bad thing to me. Would look better as a friendly warning, but in context, it does come across as a bit more of a threat.
It’s very similar here in China. Now that I’m here with the work visa, I can switch to another official employer at the end of my contract no problem. I think it can even be different work, but, if so, the company would have to provide me with a completely different Expert Certificate. (Even switching companies in the same line involves a new Expert Certificate, but if I’m doing the same thing as before, I understand that it’s a lot easier to accomplish, a lot less paperwork because my bona fides don’t have to be reestablished.)
I deal with this all the time. Playing gigs not included in your visa is a huge problem, not just for the band but also for the promoter who sponsors the band’s visa. The biggest problem you’re going to get is with the IRS. They have to be informed of each show, the pay rates for each individual in the band for each show, and all the tax ID’s for everyone involved (even if they have a US tax entity) for the entirety of their stay in the states. If a band plays a side gig and gets caught by the IRS (which can happen pretty easily even if the venue or promoter pays everyone in cash or pays a US based entity in lieu of the foreign musicians) it falls on the issuer of the visa to cover the IRS’s end of that money. The IRS will take 30% of all the money involved until they sort the situation which can take just shy of forever. The band and the members of that band can’t get another visa until it’s all squared away. A promoter who gets caught up in a couple of those can expect to lose their ability to sponsor any visas ever again. Along with losing that privilege, that promoter can expect to have the IRS all up in every inch of your business from a few years ago, up to now, and for several years to come. this is also potentially ruinous considering the mysterious accounting practices of the industry and the frequency with which promoters have to shit out equally mysterious lumps of cash to solve sketchy problems.
If a band or bands decide to say f*ck it and do it anyway, the promoter’s only chance of avoiding having the government’s hand up their butt and potentially crashing their whole operation into the mountain is to be out in front of it. And the part about making the festival look bad resulting in a call to immigration; that makes sense too when you consider that it’s going to be on the promoter to sort any legal problems resulting from a musician trying desperately to be the coolest guy at the afterparty and winding up in a tussle with the cops. And really, if you’re not a giant band then the promoter is working with you in the hopes of preserving the relationship and making big money when your band gets big. If you get kicked out the country for being an idiot then that pretty much kills your potential to tour there again. Even if the promoter avoids the wrath of the IRS or immigration they don’t ever cash in on the cost of having hosted you.
It’s stupid for sure. A lot of the stuff promoters do is mega shitty and sketchy but they put up the money to get your favorite foreign band here for you to see, so that’s nice. And like every other completely insane phrase in the contract, it wouldn’t be there if there hadn’t already been a lawsuit about it at some point.
Apparently, the spoiler-blur doesn’t apply to images in the message notification emails. So you just emailed me an unblurred picture of Justin Bieber. I hope you can live with that on your conscience.
Contracts being documents where friends imagine the death of their friendship in clinical detail, I actually don’t see the shocking part here. It’s not a binding arbitration clause or a hidden endorsement of Turmp. It feels like people have seen a critical BoingBoing post with “immigration” and “contract” in the keywords, and mounted their high horses without stopping to read further.
In fact some have started riding their high horses up onto the backs of two additional high horses, teetering around the yard on precarious horse pyramids, when this outrage is desperately needed elsewhere. Remember folx, when freeing America from tyranny, you don’t want to fire until you see the whites of their eyes.
We’re fine with keeping them out of our country too, and yours looks like as good a place as any. As a matter of fact, with the Beaver boy, we sent down a fairly normal kid. You know our returns policy: you break it, you keep it.
It’s not a warning, it’s a threat. The contract says specifically SXSW will report the artist.
As for the side gig thing, it depends on the visa and the circumstances. IAALBNTKOL, but if the side gig is for exposure not money (or money only to cover expenses) then it may very well be allowed. If the visa is a P1, multiple “employers” are allowed. Again, I don’t want to get too much in to the law on this because it’s not my specialty, and my main criticism here is about SXSW’s threat, not about visa logistics.
Moreover, he wrote, “We hope never to be put in the position to act on this.”
High weasel quotient in that statement. It’s the equivalent of me saying that if anyone does something that fails to maximize my profit or control then I’ll give them skull fractures with my fists, BUT that I’m such a compassionate person that I hope to never have to do so. Civility and decency are already transgressed with the first part; the second part is bullshit window dressing.
And Corey’s observation is correct: however shitty this policy was in and of itself in years past, it is triply so in light of the current president and the recent immigration raids in Austin. SXSW should be sweating blood to renounce this policy as quickly as possible; until they do, they have made an enemy out of me, and I look forward to spreading word of this far and wide.
