Owners of ballroom-dance studios say immigration clampdown hurts business

ORANGE, CONN.

When no Americans replied to her ads seeking a dance instructor, studio owner Chris Sabourin looked overseas.

But she was stymied by a tightening of visa-application rules that she and others contend is hampering the ballroom-dance industry. Sabourin spent a year and thousands of dollars trying to hire a dancer from Greece to teach at her Fred Astaire studio in Orange, Connecticut, but the woman was 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.”

With a steady interest in learning dances such as the foxtrot and tango, fueled in part by the TV show “Dancing with the Stars,” studio owners say their efforts to hire 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.

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 increase from weeks to months. Immigration attorneys point to the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order that President Donald Trump signed in April 2017 as one reason for delays.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of State said there has “been no policy change” regarding the O-1 visas specifically.