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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   34181 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Becky Burke, British Comic Book person returns home after 11 day ICE detention https://comicscene.substack.com/p/becky-burke-returns-home-after-us

The link isn't the best link, just the first. I googled the story and found dozens of articles that all say the same basic thing.

  • 28 yo travels America since January; ~50 days on a 90 day visa
  • At some point she tries to cross into Canada to go to Vancouver; The Canadians say no--you have the wrong visa and send her back
  • Upon returning to the other side of the border, the Americans say, "You were working on a guest visa, that means jail and deportation." Becky + Lawyers claim she was only doing 'chores' with a host family. 'Chores' are never defined, detailed or discussed.
  • 11 days in an ICE detention center; trauma for life and some great comic book material.
  • Red, red meat for Europeans looking to make hay with Trump. This story is (apparently) all over the UK right now.

I'm having a hard time establishing some of the facts, primarily, what comic works has Becky created. I can't find anything and none of the articles I've looked at link to anything. The closest I saw was that she has an Instagram account. So, is she a comic creator or just someone who lists it as her profession? I have no idea.

Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?

I'm confused by this. On one hand, Trump wants ICE to be extra hard-core and now naive Zoomers are getting swept up with bad Visas. Ok, that sucks. Shit happens. Perhaps in a kindler, gentler America we would have given them a tongue lashing and sent them home, now we jail them for a week and a half. Seems...unnecessary, but I guess the message is sent: don't come here and try to get away with doing work. Very bad!

On the other hand, how did she set trigger ICE in the first place? I don't understand how doing 'chores' even registers unless she's been watched the whole time with an eye to catching her in the act of 'doing work.' I've heard of this happening with musicians or DJs who fly into Canada as tourists only to play a gig and get busted for working. I don't think it's great, but I get why it happens. Was Becky sketching the family as part of her 'chores'? Was she doing farm work? Was she cleaning dishes and sending Instagrams about it? Did she tell ICE she had been working? Like, what the heck happened? Is this another case of "lying to cops is the only rational response," and she got swept up in a dragnet fishing for gormless fools?

A separate article mentioned this recently happened to two other people (both females...coincidence?) who were arrested because they were possibly working on travel visas. One was a German tattoo artists, who, based on the scant evidence provided in the article, seems to have been travelling with her inking gear and also worked on a prior trip to the US. The third lady is an actress who somehow didn't have the right visa either and ended up in ICE detention for a few weeks. For some reason, my mind automagically starts wondering if perhaps these artists (that's a dogwhistle for lefty activists, btw) had some Interwebz posts that somebody didn't like.

My instinct is that these are the horrifying yet rare circumstances that sell news copy but don't really say much about American immigration and customs enforcement. At the same time, I dunno...Trump, man. Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs. Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud? The information I accessed is so vague and so focused on the 'horrible treatment' I can't really get a picture of what happened, so I presume there's more going on and that if I knew what it was it would make me less sympathetic to the victim.

The British reaction to the Becky Burke story is driven by some misconceptions about US immigration law and policy which are widely shared among PMC Brits (and, I expect, PMC citizens of other 1st-world countries which are traditional US allies) because they reflect the way the US has actually handled travellers from rich, friendly countries over several decades.

In particular,

  1. PMC Brits think that they have a right to travel to any friendly country as long as they have the correct paperwork. (PMC Americans are the same, except that we are somewhat more likely than you to grok that we do in fact need to meet local paperwork requirements and obey local laws while travelling).
  2. "Working" in America is completely normal for young PMC Brits. Either engaging in legal work-like activities in WB (business visitor) status, or working legally on a F (student) or J (cultural exchange) visa. BUNAC is a long-standing scheme allowing (among other things - it is broadly reciprocal among several Anglosphere countries) British students to spend a summer working in the US on a J visa while only nominally complying with the rules for J visas. When my parents were students, they basically used BUNAC to travel across the US for a summer in a beater car picking up odd work like hoboes - and this was legal. (And in those days it was dead easy to get pick-up work if you were an experienced waitress with a posh British accent). The rules have been tightened up since then, but there is still an expectation that if you want to spend a summer working in the US, making it happen is just a matter of paperwork.
  3. There is no clarity about what work-like activity is legal in WB status and what requires a working visa. I worked, for pay, at Brookhaven National Laboratory for a summer in WB status - it was legal because academic visitors can receive per diem even in WB status, and the allowed per diem worked out to more than a British grad student stipend. A friend was refused admission for trying to do the same thing interning at a think tank - what he was doing didn't qualify as "academic", and therefore he couldn't receive per diem.
  4. Accordingly, we see working illegally as a paperwork screwup similar to trying to travel on an expired passport, not as a crime of moral turpitude. We expect that if we get caught it will be laughed off as we get the next plane home. And a lot of people have stories that confirm this - I know two people who were refused admission (the aforementioned intern, and someone who failed to declare a minor drug conviction), and in both cases they were on the next plane home after a few hours in the secondary inspection area, and never saw anything that looked like a prison cell. As far as I am aware, both had the event paperworked as a voluntary departure so they didn't become inadmissable for future trips as deportees.

So from this perspective, it looks like

  • Becky didn't know precisely what was legal in terms of chores-for-lodging, and didn't feel the need to check
  • She thought the worst that could happen when she got caught was being put on the next plane home
  • Throwing her in the general population of an ICE detention centre for 11 days is an insult to both her personal dignity and our sense of our rights as a US ally because it is treating a Brit like a random third world peasant.

And of course the story has legs because it fits into the (accurate) narrative that the Trump administration is no longer treating the UK as an important ally.

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