Visa fee hikes and delays hinder international artists from touring the United States

NEW YORK (AP) — In New York City, spirited badge-holders and independent music fans wove in and out of 150-person capacity 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 U.S. In the last few years, the process has grown much more arduous and expensive.

“It’s already at the maximum level of difficulty that we can rationalize,” said Mischa Dempsey, frontperson for the thrilling Montreal band Knitting, who performed at New Colossus and described the process as “labor intensive.”

“I can’t even think about it getting worse.”

How did we get here?

On April 1, 2024, the USCIS introduced a visa fee increase, raising the cost from $460 to over $1,615 per musician application, the first bump since 2016. According to the USCIS website, the increase allows the organization to “recover our operating costs more fully and support timely processing of new applications.”

Nearly a year later, “we are seeing the opposite,” immigration attorney Gabriel Castro said. “We are seeing cases actually slow down.”

The USCIS did not respond to an email from the AP.

Visa processing times slow

Changes to the system have caused delays. According to Tamizdat, a nonprofit that advocates for international artist mobility, all visa petitions are now filed through a centralized service center in Texas and are randomly divvyed up to preexisting California and Vermont service centers.

The result has been slowed processing times. Matthew Covey, an immigration attorney 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's 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 $2,800 to expedite it.”

Castro says small and mid-tier artists don’t have the luxury of spending nearly $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 U.S. 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’s a combination of inefficiencies and delays.”

Are international artists avoiding the U.S.?

The headlines are frequent: The K-pop group KARD canceled its 2025 U.S. tour due to 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, due to visa delays.

All international musicians require work authorization to perform in the U.S. There are scarce exemptions available to only a few, like the Visa Waiver Program, which is often used at South by Southwest.

“The safest approach is always to get a ... visa,” says Castro.

Jacobsen says “there’s definitely a buzz about whether touring in the U.S. is still a good economic option” for these artists.

“I’m hearing more and more frequently from artists who are just like, ‘I’m going to take a break from the U.S. for a while. It’s not a return on my investment. It’s not worth it,’” says Covey.

Who is most affected?

Delays and fee increases disproportionally affect “world music artists, jazz, indie bands who are developing,” says Covey, as well as “artists outside of 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' lineups 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 recognize our festival as a showcase festival. And the bands get funded to come here by those bodies.”

But still, that does not make them immune to last-minute cancellations. This year, artists from Ireland, Scotland and Italy canceled. A band from Paraguay was held up by visa delays; they arrived after their second scheduled performance straight from the airport. Hiçamahiç, a band from Istanbul, had to cancel entirely.

In a statement, Hiçamahiç explained that two band members couldn’t get visa appointments in time, despite working with an intermediary agency. “The U.S. 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 don’t think we are any different from a citizen of the U.K. or Germany.”

Matrick says, “We have probably 10 cancellations a year, with people that don’t get the funding to purchase visas,” or their visas are not processed in time.

Castro reminds that the loss of international talent stateside is not just a cultural one, but economic. “It’s a loss for the venues ... the bars, the parking lots,” he lists.

Concerns under a new presidency

“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 U.S. 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 that doesn’t mean that changes in immigration, generally, can affect these visas tangentially. The slow-down in immigration processes is a slow down 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 last month, the U.S. government ordered a visa ban on transgender athletes looking to enter the U.S. 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 don’t.”

Dempsey, of the band Knitting, said: “Three of us are gender nonconforming and I think more than anything, we're scared of what it’s going to be like in the States, what it’s going to be like to cross the border."