Immigration Lawyers Toolbox Magazine
MY HISTORY OF THE O & P REGULATIONS by KARIN WOLMAN, Esq.
T
Karin Wolman, Esq.
Karin@KWVisaLaw.com
8
ILT Magazine
his is a short history of how I got acquainted with the O & P visa categories, around the time they were first implemented. I had graduated from law school in 1990 with an all-public-sector resume, in the middle of a pretty big recession. I came back to New York, and I was staying with a friend in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who was working at BAM - the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the nation’s oldest performing arts center. She told me they were short-handed and it was easy to find temporary jobs there, so I started temping my way around the building. I worked at the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and in the Development office, and in Special Events, and the President’s office. I forget how many departments I temped in, but sooner or later, somebody offered me a full-time job with benefits in the General Manager’s office, which at the time seemed like a really good idea. I stayed, and I ended up working as an administrative assistant at BAM for four years. I did all kinds of work there, some of it clerical and reception, some contract administration, some company management & hospitality, some legal or quasi-legal – it was a hodge-podge. I happened to be working there when the O & P Visas were first introduced at the end of 1991, when BAM was |co-producing and presenting a huge
Issue No . 3
offsite production called “Les Atrides,” located at the Brooklyn Armory, with a very large, distinguished French theater company – Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théatre du Soleil.
This was BAM’s first experience as a performing arts presenter dealing with these new visa categories, when the O & P regulations had just recently gone into effect. To guide us through that process, they had hired a fancy Washington DC immigration lawyer who had been one of the drafters who helped craft those regulations. His name was Jonathan Ginsburg. Now, since I became a practicing immigration lawyer, Jonathan and I have served on national committees together. I inherited his O & P visa survey article, which I updated annually for about five years, and which has since grown to something bigger than one person can update every year. We have a running joke that he taught me everything I know, which is not quite the truth, but structurally, Jonathan taught me how to think about visa petitions, and he really gave me the foundation of what the O & P categories were about. Even though I was not working as an attorney, I was doing legal work, among other stuff, including stagehand payroll it was a really a wacky amalgam of jobs.