ORANGE, Conn. (AP) — When no Americans replied to her ads seeking a dance instructor, studio owner Chris Sabourin looked overseas. But she was stymied again by a federal tightening of visa application rules she and others contend is hampering the ballroom dance industry.
Sabourin had to eventually give up after a year and thousands of dollars trying to hire a top ballroom dancer from Greece to teach at her Fred Astaire studio in Orange, Connecticut, only to have the woman detained at New York's Kennedy Airport and sent back home.
"It would just be nice to know why we're having such a hard time," Sabourin said. "It's affecting our business, definitely."
With a steady interest in learning iconic dances like the foxtrot and tango, fueled in part by "Dancing with the Stars," studio owners like Sabourin say their efforts to hire professional instructors are hampered without overseas help.
The owners, national representatives of the Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire dance studio chains, and attorneys describe greater backlogs for visa applications and an overall increase in evidence requests, including for redundant information and unnecessary documents.
Immigration lawyers contend President Donald Trump's administration has erected an "invisible wall" of hurdles that has made it difficult for all kinds of U.S. industries, from ballroom dance to STEM fields, to hire foreign workers for jobs they've had a difficult time filling with qualified Americans.
A review of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services data released in January by the American Immigration Lawyers Association found that average case processing time surged by 46% from fiscal year 2016, the last full year of the prior administration, to fiscal year 2018 — from 6.5 months to 9.48 months.
In congressional testimony provided in July, the association's president, Marketa Lindt, said USCIS's overall backlog of delayed cases exceeded 5.69 million this past fiscal year, a 69% increase over fiscal year 2014.
Meanwhile, federal records reviewed by The Associated Press show a slight uptick since 2017 in initial denials of O-1 visa applications from individuals with "extraordinary ability or achievement" — the visa that many of the foreign dancers seek — as well as for O-1 visa applicants who were given a second chance to meet eligibility requirements.
Representatives of the dance industry say they've seen the processing times for those nonimmigrant visas, which allow the dancers to work in the U.S. for up to three years, increase from weeks to months, with uncertainty the application will be approved.
In one case, a dancer approved to work at a Fred Astaire studio in Southbury, Connecticut, was later denied at the American consulate in his home country of Ecuador, one of the last steps in the process.
Jose Zuquilanda, 23, had hoped to compete, train, teach, dance and learn how to run a business at a Fred Astaire studio in Southbury, Connecticut.