I was watching a Cr1tikal video regarding his E-Sports team and he was upset about his E sports team being denied entry to the country. Are you still an immigrant if you are staying temporarily? Does that make you an emmigrant? If not, what is an emmigrant?
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It can be kind of funky. But yes, anyone who is from another country is under the authority of immigration officials, even if that person is just a tourist.
A lot of countries on good terms with the US have free entry for tourism. So long as people aren’t coming here to do work or stay permanently, all those people have to do is go through customs and describe their intent to be a tourist then go back home without making any money. We’ll come back to why “making money” matters.
Some countries aren’t on such good terms, so those people require more approval. They might have to apply for a visa in advance. A visa is just a document that proves you went through the process of convincing immigration you are here for good reasons and should be allowed in. (It’s possible even people on good terms need one, I’m not super sure.)
Now, if you’re coming here to do work and make money, you ABSOLUTELY need to go through more procedure. The US wants to tax all money earned by people while working in the US. So even if a person is from another country, if they come to the US on business and get paid by a US company that money has to be taxed. This can introduce a ton of complications depending on the countries and companies involved.
It sounds like that’s probably what happened here. The team applied for a visa so they could participate in a tournament, and for whatever reason the immigration officials decided to reject the visas. I tried to look into it and it sounds weird. That’s why this group is suing the US Department of Immigration: they think something unfair happened. Until they win that lawsuit, their visas are denied.
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To circle back to your question:
I don’t think most people would call this team “immigrants”. They’re clearly here to perform in an event and not become permanent residents. The dictionary definition of the word involves a person trying to live in the country permanently.
They are also not “emmigrants”, that’s actually the other direction: if a person is an “immigrant” to the US, they are an “emmigrant” to the country they came from.
But basically, the “Department of Immigration” oversees BOTH immigration and tourism/work visas, because it’s easier to keep all of that in one organization than to have two that do the same thing. I don’t think the government even considers them “immigrants”, legally. There’s not enough information in what I saw to see what the government is thinking, and since they’re suing the US over it I think they believe what happened isn’t legal anyway.
They could’ve *tried* to do this without applying in advance, but it wouldn’t end well. At the airport, they’d have to declare why they’re here. If they said, “To participate in an e-sports tournament” that would likely sound like “work” and get them flagged to go through a work visa application process. This might’ve even happened at the airport in their own country, because they might not have been able to board their plane without visas. If they *lied* and said “tourism”, then they’re putting the tournament organizers at risk because that would technically be tax fraud. They’d definitely end up disqualified over that, because the organizers would have to legally prove they took no part in it and didn’t encourage it.
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