Beauties vs. Geeks at US Border; Geeks Win

June 11, 2008 — -- A sharp mind and a computer science degree will get you what a beautiful face and a great body won't, at least if you're a foreigner hoping to work in the United States.

For the past several years, a quirk in federal law has forced foreign fashion models to compete with computer programmers and other brainy professionals to win coveted visas to allow them to work, even for a single photo shoot, in the United States.

The geeks have been winning most of the visas, according to those who want to change the law. The number of visas issued to foreign models dropped to just 349 in 2007, according to the Politico newspaper.

One lawmaker who is deeply concerned with the foreign-model crisis, Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., introduced a bill last fall to move models to a new category.

Although the bill was recently approved by the House Judiciary Committee, not everybody is happy with the legislation. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, has called it the "Ugly Americans bill" because it suggests the United States lacks hotties.

"In a country of 300 million people, don't we have enough homegrown talent to grace the covers of Vogue and Mademoiselle?" he asked at a May hearing, according to Roll Call newspaper (which helpfully noted that Mademoiselle no longer exists).

If the bill raises questions that Congress is distracting itself from bigger issues, say, a looming recession, take heart: the foreign-model crisis is clearly contributing to the economic downturn that needs addressing, as the Judiciary Committee suggested in a report accompanying the bill.

By forcing advertisers and clothing companies to shoot overseas when they want to use foreign models, tax revenue is lost, the panel noted, and "firms that manage fashion models in the United States lose commissions to foreign firms." Ad firms and fashion photographers in the United States also lose out, the committee said, and the hair and makeup artists, fashion stylists and assistants, the report listed.

Weiner is a bachelor and "swingingly single," as the New York Observer recently dubbed him, and has been known to date women with reputations for both brains and looks. Weiner recently confirmed he is seeing an aide to fellow New York Democrat Sen. Hillary Clinton named Huma Abedein, whom the Observer called "mysterious, glamorous and eerily unflappable."