Report on Conference Visa
Problems
Barbara Boucher Owens, SGB-EC
Conference Advisor
3/7/2011 ACM SGB
Survey Monkey
• Survey sent out in December and re-sent in
January to 60 conference leaders
• 45 responses
– 13 conferences reported problems
– 3 were unsure
• One conference had two separate responses. That
one actually had visa problems but they weren’t
reported.
3/7/2011 ACM SGB
17 presenters were denied visas
•
•
•
•
7 for conferences in UK
5 in USA
3 in Italy
1 each in Spain and France
– 9 of the presenters denied visas were students, 3
for UK Conference
– Note that the UK conference registration was
open less than three months before conference
3/7/2011 ACM SGB
16 paid attendees (not presenters)
were denied visas
• 11 of these were students
• 5 students Brazil conference (no notice of
ACM letter on website)
3/7/2011 ACM SGB
Advice
• Open registration early – some countries may
take up to 6 months to process student visas
• Stress the importance of the ACM visa letter
information being referenced on the
conference website and call
• Expect
– More problems occur with student visas than
professionals
– More problems for attendees only
3/7/2011 ACM SGB
Comments
• ACM should pay expenses with visa for the invited
speakers SIGDOC Brazil
• Surprisingly, most of the people that had troubles to
get visas were US residents (Chinese, Indian,
Vietnamese, Turkish, ..). It seems that French
consulates in US are very tight. ISCA in France
• Due to the diversity of visas and some nationals had
problems. We had a mostly smooth conference
otherwise - these were isolated cases. SIGCOMM India
• We were informed of a few problems of Chinese
students. Mainly due to the procedures of Chinese
government ACM Multimedia Italy
3/7/2011 ACM SGB
More Comments
•
•
•
•
The registration was open 2 months before the conference. The first visa letter
was asked then, and the last one was asked 1 month before the conference. As far
as I know, all of them got their visa in time (6 persons). As I already mentioned,
the one person who had visa problems did not ask for a letter. SCA2010 Computer
Animation Spain
The support letters for visa applicants were provided by the ACM (through the
<supportletter@acm.org> role address). Nevertheless, we had cases where the UK
border officer rejected the application, for example, due to "insufficient funds".
This was after the applicant had paid for the conference registration, submitted
the support letter, and also included evidence of flight tickets and accommodation.
To avoid these kinds of issues for future ACM conferences hosted in the UK, we
would like to understand the root causes. One possible explanation is that the
support letters provided by the ACM did not highlight the key statements that a UK
border officer may look for. In particular, they may have not understood the
meaning of having an accepted paper at a conference, which then led to
unnecessary visa rejections. DEBS Distributed Event Based Systems UK
3/7/2011 ACM SGB
Still more
• A few months after the conference FBI agents visited
me asking me why the person (chinese) who was
granted the visa 2 days after the conference ended did
not come to the conference. Speechless just about
begins to describe my state at that moment.
SIGMetrics US
• In this case it appears the person did not apply in time.
5th Int’l Conference on Wireless Underwater USA
• This conference is traditionally majority non-North
American so we have heavy international participation.
Only problems we experienced were with China. ACM
Group 2010 USA
3/7/2011 ACM SGB
Last Comments
• We had two visa or visa-related issues (one person lost his
passport, the other was a Pakistani or Iranian resident in
the UK). For the second person, the participants submitted
all documents but they could not get their US visa in time. I
do not think that they missed any support from us or the
VisWeek, it was mainly a timing issue. ACM SoftVIS
•
• It just seemed that receiving a letter of support from
supportletters@acm.org is taking too long. We received a
few requests from authors who had contacted the address
and had not received any response after a few days. ACM
CoNEXT 2010
3/7/2011 ACM SGB