Award-winning Australian comic Alice Fraser has canceled an upcoming journey to New York to advertise her new e book, citing considerations that her previous jokes about President Donald Trump and Elon Musk — the world’s richest particular person and a distinguished Trump ally — might create issues for her with U.S. border officers.
Fraser outlined a number of elements behind her resolution in a submit on Patreon final month, explaining why she’d pulled the plug on a promotional go to for “A Passion for Passion: A Delirious Love Letter To Romance.”
Among the explanations: the collapse and “rebirth” of her writer, restrictions on doing unpaid promotional work beneath the U.S. ESTA Visa Waiver Program and the $3,000 price of making use of for a piece visa.
But a significant concern, Fraser stated, got here after she sought authorized recommendation from an immigration lawyer in regards to the potential penalties of her satirical, Trump-mocking materials.
The lawyer, she wrote, “couldn’t guarantee that having made publicly available jokes that could be considered critical of the administration wouldn’t count in my disfavour in the application” to enter America.
Fraser recalled asking what she thought was a “silly, paranoid question” about whether or not her jokes about Trump and Musk may trigger points. But the lawyer took it severely, warning her that border brokers will “definitely google you,” and that choices would finally be as much as the discretion of the visa officer or the particular person assessing her on the border.
Speaking to The Guardian in an article revealed Thursday, Fraser admitted she was shocked by the warning ― which comes amid current experiences of vacationers and authorized immigrants dealing with hassle on the border, being denied entry or detained.
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“I thought I was being paranoid,” Fraser stated, noting how the lawyer admitted that whereas “the vast majority of people will be able to travel in and out … they’re definitely doing increased scrutinising.”
Fraser added that she may need been “more open” to taking the danger if she didn’t have two younger kids. She informed The Guardian she nonetheless hopes to go to the U.S. sooner or later — however solely “when it’s no longer reasonable for a visa lawyer to say I should purge my social media before I go there because a joke about Elon Musk might be considered hostile to the nation.”
Fraser didn’t instantly return HuffPost’s request for remark.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/comedian-scraps-us-visit-donald-trump_n_67f8c9a8e4b089014393ae73