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 during the New Colossus Festival, held a few weeks ago. 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 of obtaining necessary visas 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." On April 1, 2024, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (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." 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 divvied 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." This article was provided by The Associated Press.
