How US visa fee increases and delays are stopping musicians big and small touring there

In New York, fans of indie music wove in and out of clubs filled with groups from around the globe. A Japanese rock band opened for a German post-punk trio followed by an alternative group from New Zealand. And that was just day one at the New Colossus Festival, held last week. The six-day event takes its name from the poem cast on the Statue of Liberty, viewed as a welcome message for new immigrants: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses ….” Now in its sixth year, 196 artists were scheduled to perform, more than half from outside the United States. But New Colossus may be an exception, not the rule, for international artists hoping to perform in the US. In the past few years, the process has grown much more arduous and expensive. “It’s already at the maximum level of difficulty that we can rationalise,” said Mischa Dempsey, frontman for the Montreal band Knitting, who performed at New Colossus and described the process as “labour intensive”. “I can’t even think about it getting worse.” On April 1, 2024, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) introduced a visa fee increase, raising the cost from US$460 (HK$3,600) to over US$1,615 per musician application, the first increase since 2016. According to the USCIS website, the increase allows the organisation to “recover our operating costs more fully and support timely processing of new applications”. Nearly a year later, “we are seeing the opposite”, immigration lawyer Gabriel Castro said. “We are seeing cases actually slow down.” The USCIS did not respond to a request for comment. I’m hearing more frequently from artists who are just like, ‘I’m going to take a break from the US’ Matthew Covey, immigration lawyer and advocate for international artists Changes to the system have caused delays. According to Tamizdat, a non-profit organisation that advocates for international artist mobility, all visa petitions are now filed through a centralised service centre in Texas and are randomly divvied up to pre-existing service centres in the states of California and Vermont. The result has been slowed processing times. Matthew Covey, an immigration lawyer and Tamizdat’s executive director, says Vermont has gone from one month to three. In California, it previously took two to four months, but now it is eight. “Nobody’s filing petitions long enough in advance to sustain an eight-month delay,” says Covey. “You got a 50/50 chance of it being done in a reasonable amount of time or having to pay an extra US$2,800 to expedite it.” Castro says small and mid-tier artists do not have the luxury of spending nearly US$3,000 on expedited processing or booking tour dates eight months in advance. “And you have to have those tour dates before you apply for the visa,” he adds. “It’s just more expensive than ever to try and do a tour in the US. And that’s a problem,” says Jen Jacobsen, executive director at The Artist Rights Alliance. “And I wouldn’t say the fee change by itself has had the impact – it is a combination of inefficiencies and delays.” The headlines are frequent: the K-pop group Kard cancelled their 2025 US tour because of visa issues. So did the Canadian metal band Respire. The up-and-coming Swedish rapper Bladee delayed his 2024 tour for similar issues. In the film world, Iranian co-directors Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani took home an Oscar for their animated short, In the Shadow of the Cypress – after arriving in Los Angeles just hours before the awards ceremony because of visa delays. All international musicians require work authorisation to perform in the US. Jacobsen says “there’s definitely a buzz about whether touring in the US is still a good economic option” for these artists. “I’m hearing more frequently from artists who are just like, ‘I’m going to take a break from the US for a while. It’s not a return on my investment. It’s not worth it,’” Covey says. Delays and fee increases disproportionately affect “world music artists, jazz, indie bands who are developing”, Covey says, as well as “artists outside Europe who have government support … if they come in from the Global South, they generally are not going to have a lot of government funding to cover these kinds of costs”. New Colossus’ line-ups have benefited from governments who support local artists. “Countries like Germany, England, Canada, France, Ireland and Wales have funding bodies that the bands apply for,” says Steven Matrick, one of the New Colossus Festival founders. “They recognise our festival as a showcase festival. And the bands get funded to come here by those bodies.” If we want a rich palette of artistry to be here, we have to make it a welcoming environment Jen Jacobsen, executive director at The Artist Rights Alliance But still, that does not make them immune to last-minute cancellations. This year, artists from Ireland, Scotland and Italy cancelled. A band from Paraguay was held up by visa delays; they arrived after their second scheduled performance straight from the airport. Hicamahic, a band from Istanbul, had to cancel entirely. In a statement, Hicamahic explained that two band members could not get visa appointments in time, despite working with an intermediary agency. “The US is currently issuing standard visa interview dates for Turkish citizens nearly 1,000 days later, which feels like an elitist form of discrimination. We are deeply disappointed by this situation,” they wrote. “We do not think we are any different from a citizen of the UK or Germany.” Matrick says, “We have probably 10 cancellations a year, with people that do not get the funding to purchase visas” or their visas are not processed in time. Castro stresses that the loss of international talent is not just a cultural one, but economic. “It’s a loss for the venues … the bars, the parking lots,” he says. “Based on the last Trump administration, what we saw over the course of the four years were increasing problems with consular process,” Covey says. “The delay times increased. The number of errors increased. Obviously, the scrutiny … increased. “We’re expecting that we will probably start seeing increased delays in the visa processing at US embassies,” he adds. And in a period of global conflict, “your indie rock band is really not priority”. Castro said it is early to make predictions “of what this is going to look like in the future … But changes in immigration, generally, can affect these visas tangentially. The slowdown in immigration processes is a slowdown for everyone.” “Some of the policies about clamping down on illegal immigration sometimes flow into areas – unintended areas, perhaps – but areas that can impact legal immigration,” says Jacobsen. “If we want a rich palette of artistry to be here, we have to make it a welcoming environment for them.” There are other potential impacts. At the end of February, the US government ordered a visa ban on transgender athletes looking to enter the US for sports events. “They’re just talking about enforcing it on athletes, but it doesn’t take very much to imagine them enforcing that on anyone,” says Covey. “I’m concerned that the political agendas of the current administration could impact which artists get visas and which do not.” Dempsey, of the band Knitting, said: “Three of us are gender nonconforming and I think more than anything, we’re scared of what it is going to be like in the States, what it is going to be like to cross the border.”

How US visa fee increases and delays are stopping musicians big and small touring there

1,000-day waits for interviews. 8 months for processing. Higher fees. Visa applications are a headache for acts looking to tour the States