visa fees

After excitedly booking her showcase at next week’s South by Southwest music festival, Zoë Mead, the British shoegaze artist known as Wyldest, tried to land other U.S. club and festival gigs to offset her already-high travel expenses.
To do all this legally, she learned, required getting a temporary work visa costing $460 plus another $2,800 for faster processing. Hiring a lawyer or immigration specialist to file the application would have added another thousand dollars minimum to the bill. “It’s just too risky,” she says. “You have to reject a hell of a lot of things, which is really frustrating.”

And beginning April 1, immigration and visa entry costs for international artists playing festivals, concerts or label events in the U.S. are set to rise even higher.

Trending on Billboard

The fees for filing “O” and “P” visa petitions — the former covers “individuals who possess extraordinary ability,” the latter “internationally renowned performing groups” and music ensembles of up to 25 people — will increase from $460 to maximum costs of $1,655 and $1,615, respectively. That price includes a $600 Asylum Program Fee, which the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will use to offset the costs of adjudicating cases of immigrants seeking asylum from persecution and violence — a process unrelated to the music business. 

There are, however, reduced rates for visa applications backed by a promoter, agency, festival or record company (the so-called petitioner) with less than 25 full-time employees. For those companies, the new fee is capped at $830 (including a $300 asylum levy). For non-profit petitioners, the total fee is capped at $530. (Crews and traveling production staff also require either an appropriate O or P visa to work in the U.S., while artists invited to perform at official showcase events like SXSW, such as Mead, maybe able to enter the U.S. using an ESTA/Visa Waiver, which costs $21). 

USCIS representatives say the increased fees will cover rising business costs and reduce processing backlogs. They also contend the pricing surge will not affect musicians because promoters, club owners and labels will be paying the fees.

It’s cold comfort for international acts — especially those starting their live careers — who fear those costs will ultimately be passed on to them, making it too expensive for all but established artists to play U.S. dates. “It’s going to have a chilling effect,” says Rita Sostrin, a Los Angeles-based immigration attorney who represents many international acts. “I’m certainly hearing a lot of displeasure from my clients for these higher fees.”

The fear among international artists, especially those at the start of their live careers, is that the extra costs will ultimately be passed onto them, making it too expensive for all but established international acts to play American concert venues and festivals. “That burden of applying for and paying for the visas is shared across the artists, managers, promoters and venues,” says Neeta Ragoowanski, president of the Music Managers Forum U.S., which opposes the fee increases. “It’s going to affect artists’ decisions on how these tours go,” she says. 

Last year, USCIS temporarily paused its plans to increase fees following strong opposition from artist and music-industry advocacy groups such as the National Independent Venue Association and UK Music.

The new fees being introduced April 1 are nominally lower than the non-tiered rises first proposed by USCIS, but still represent “a significant extra burden for touring U.K. bands and artists, particularly for emerging acts that operate on the tightest of margins,” says UK Music interim chief executive Tom Kiehl.

Those margins are being squeezed tighter by the majority of international artists needing to pay out for “premium” visa processing, says Andy Corrigan, owner of U.K.-based Viva La Visa, which specializes in immigration services for music acts and has recently work on U.S. touring arrangement for The Damned and former Spice Girl Melanie C. Premium processing fees rose in February from $2,500 to $2,805 with the time for processing applications increasing from 15 calendar days to 15 business days.

“Almost every band that we deal with has to use premium because the standard processing is so uncertain,” he says. “The whole system is loaded against new and emerging artists. It’s grossly unfair.”

Corrigan says he has lowered his company’s visa fees following the price rises “to try and mitigate the increase in costs for everybody,” but fears that some artists will be tempted to enter the U.S. illegally, without the proper visa documentation in place, as a result of the extra financial burden being placed on them. 

“People have got to take a longer-term view and recognize the value of cultural exchange and music, and not just think that they can squeeze every dollar out of the sector,” says Jon Collins, chief executive of U.K. industry trade group LIVE. He calls USCIS’s January sudden announcement of the rise in visa fees – following a period of consultation – a “fait accompli” that will have a detrimental impact on the health of the U.K. and U.S. grass roots music industry. 

“It just feels like you’re constantly being slapped in the face,” says Mead, who had to turn down an invitation to play a pre-SXSW festival, New Colossus, in New York next month. “It was already expensive, and they put it up even more, and it’s like, ‘how?’”

LONDON — A proposed hike in U.S. visa fees, which could take effect as early as this November, would have a “deeply damaging” effect on touring artists from other countries by more than doubling their costs, says a leading British music industry trade group.  

The proposal from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, announced in early January, would raise the rates for O and P visas for working entertainers in the U.S., including musicians playing festivals, concerts or label events. 

U.K. Music, which represents the country’s recorded and live music industries, is protesting the fee hike, including a $600 “asylum program fee,” a new charge USCIS has proposed adding for U.S.-based employers, which the U.K. group says would raise total visa fees by more than four times their current levels. The trade group, which says the U.S. visa process is “already long, complex and prohibitively expensive” for many musicians, has asked British officials to lobby against the increases.

“The visa process for U.S. musicians entering the U.K. to work is far simpler and less costly,” the group says in a statement, “and we believe that this should be reciprocated by the U.S.” 

Under USCIS’s proposed new rates, a concert promoter who employs an international musician qualifying for an “O” visa to tour the U.S. would pay $1,055, rather than the current fee of $460, an increase of 129% — or 260% with the proposed $600 asylum program fee. For the “P” visa classification for touring musicians, the U.S. employer’s fee would jump from $460 to $1,015, or 121% — plus the $600 fee, which would add up to a 251% spike. 

A USCIS spokesperson tells Billboard the increases would not affect musicians themselves, but rather their U.S. employers, including promoters, club owners, labels or festival producers. International artists reps say employers are likely to pass these fee increases onto the artists — and possibly to consumers as higher-priced tickets —making it more challenging to tour crucial American concert venues. 

“It leaves our artists in a state of paralysis,” says Courtney Askew-Conti of Verdigris Management, which represents U.K. bands Hot Chip and Jungle, adding that the fee increase “feels like the final nail in the coffin” after Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The U.S. government is proposing the new fees to allow USCIS to “more fully recover operating costs for the first time in six years” and to “support the administration’s effort to rebuild the legal immigration system,” the agency’s director, Ur M. Jaddou, said in a January statement. 

“For artists who are established, it’s an annoyance,” says Michael Lambert, whose management company A Modern Way represents Idlewild, We Were Promised Jetpacks and other Scottish bands. “There will be a lot of artists in that emerging to mid-level stage that just decide that they can’t afford to do it.” 

While “some cases might be reasonable, this gigantic increase seems unreasonable,” says Rita Sostrin, a Los Angeles immigration lawyer who represents international artists trying to obtain O and P visas. “It’s just not the right way, to do this broad-brush increase for everyone.” 

The USCIS rep stresses that the fee changes are not final, and the comment period is open through March 13. “If organizations have those concerns, that’s what they should be submitting,” the spokesperson says. “This is just a proposed rule.” 

U.K. trade groups are particularly concerned about how the changes will affect artists during a period when gas prices, supply-chain issues and other lingering COVID-19 effects are making it challenging for club-and-theatre-level artists to tour international markets, including the U.S. 

For U.K. artists, the U.S. is the second-largest touring market after Europe. Even before the proposed price hikes were announced, rising costs were already leading British artists to pull U.S. shows. In April, Mercury Prize-winning rapper Little Simz cancelled an 11-date U.S. tour, citing the financial unviability of the undertaking as an independent artist. 

A survey conducted by two other U.K. trade bodies, Music Managers Forum (MMF) and the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), found that 70% of their members believe the increased visa charges would mean they could no longer afford to tour the U.S.