Irish J1 visa holder, the article, the bar work and "artistic licence"

mike65

I'm sure some will know all about this (couldn't find a thread on it though!)
A Donegal woman in her 20s decided to get work outside her stated area of expertise (and the J1 visa work definition in her case) and get work in a bar.
Thing is rather than keep a low profile she included this in a three page article published here in the Irish Voice.

Although we were meant to be finding work in the areas that we had graduated in, time and money were not our friends, so we did what most people do and got a job in the service industry working at an Irish bar where we were free to ask everyone “What’s the craic?” without being arrested on suspicion of hoarding drugs.

The Irish International Immigrant Centre read this and wrote to her informing her of having broken the terms & conditions of her visa and that she must leave the United States by June 19.

Just to add some smokes and mirrors to this, her defence is that the article is in fact fiction and she never worked in a bar

from indo

New York immigration lawyer James O'Malley has taken up her case and says she will fight deportation on the basis that she never worked in a bar.

He told the Irish Independent: "She was writing a blog in which she took some sort of poetic or dramatic licence and put herself in the shoes of some of her colleagues or peers, people who do have to go outside of this (terms of the visa) in order to make a living here.

"My understanding is she never worked in a bar.

"She's a graduate with a degree in creative writing and that's what she wants to do. So she got her internship but she wanted to write about this experience."

Her publisher Mr O'Dowd said the article did contain elements of creative writing, saying: "What she wrote was her experience in America as she saw it, with parts of it taken as a composite of friends of hers and what they went through."

This is of course a great angle as she cannot name a bar she didn't work in and claims she made up, unless the authorities go to the trouble of finding photographic and/or first hand testimony to place her in a Manhattan bar and then working in same on the day in question (St Patricks this year) it'll be hard to prove I'd have thought.

orestes

An Irish person dodging American immigration laws to work in an Irish bar in New York on St. Patricks Day?

Even if it is fiction, it's hardly what I'd call creative writing.