Rocking In The Free World? The U.S. Artist Visa Nightmare

To tour America or not? That is the question increasingly more international artists are asking themselves as they consider if the rising costs, time and hassle of playing the U.S. is worth it.

Touring expenses were already up with higher production, insurance, transportation and lodging costs; ticket sales are somewhat mixed; and obtaining an artist visa is increasingly a lengthy, expensive and invasive bureaucratic process . Over the course of the Trump Administration’s less than three months in office, its policies have had a deleterious impact on international touring with tariffs, a bugled trade war, mass deportations and the revocation of visas based on political speech , which is causing consternation even amongst established musicians.

“When I go to play music in Europe, if I talk about Donald J. Trump, I may be one of those returning to America who is barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor with an aluminum blanket,” wrote no less a figure than Neil Young on his website on April 1. While that may be hyperbolic for the treasured Canadian-born artist, who is also an American citizen and touring Europe this summer before coming back to play the U.S., those concerns for many are legitimate.

While U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is detaining migrants — including some with proper paperwork to be in the country — deportations without due process have sparked concerns across the country as well as in the live industry, which is increasingly dependent on the globalization of business. Pollstar has verified at least four artists who have faced visa issues, with three being denied entry and one reportedly not having their paperwork in order.

One act recently barred by Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau is regional Mexican band Los Alegres del Barranco because their recent set in Guadalajara included an image of a cartel leader, an expression the U.S. government saw as “glorifying” a “drug kingpin.” Some of the band’s music pertains to a popular subgenre known as narcocorridos, and many Mexican artists, including stars like Peso Pluma and Natanael Cano, sing about narco culture much in the same way hip-hop, country, rock, metal and many others have historically glorified figures who run afoul of the law (“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” for example, sang the great Johnny Cash).

“I’m a firm believer in freedom of expression, but that doesn’t mean expression should be free of consequences,” Landau wrote on X. “… In the Trump Administration, we take seriously our responsibility over foreigners’ access to our country. The last thing we need is a welcome mat for people who extol criminals and terrorists.”

These incidents prompted many in the Latin music industry to advise artists to be more careful with what they say, especially on social media. Many, however, are used to being under the microscope of the U.S. government.

“The truth is, this has always happened,” said Abraham Contreras of Uno Productions, who has worked in managing and booking artists as well as helping them acquire visas. “Maybe they’re checking more closely now and being more selective, but artists who are especially active on social media or at their concerts need to be careful because they could harm their careers. … There is more scrutiny, and they do verify all of the information now. Before, they didn’t look so hard.”

Another incident occurred last month involving the classic British punk band U.K. Subs who formed in the 1970s. Arriving at Los Angeles International Airport, three members who traveled together were denied entry, according to a Facebook post from bassist Alvin Gibbs. He was told they didn’t “have the right visa” and there was another issue “which they wouldn’t disclose” that prevented them from entering the country.

However, Gibbs suspected that previous “less than flattering public pronouncements regarding their president and his administration were a factor…or maybe that’s succumbing to paranoia.” Gibbs was kept in a “holding room for 25 hours without sleep and with only a pot noodle and a couple of cups of tea” before being sent back.

Kate Hyman, who works with artists through her Big Ears Music Consultancy company, shared with Pollstar a similar story involving a musician and UCLA student from Mumbai on the condition that the artist’s name is not mentioned. She said that the young man visited family and was returning to his apartment in L.A. but was detained at the airport for more than 15 hours despite having a student visa. He was allowed only one phone call before having his phone confiscated.

“Every time he tried to close his eyes, they would wake him up, so he could not go to sleep, which is basically torture,” Hyman said. “They then walked in and said, ‘You’re going home.’ And he’s this very polite, really sweet kid who didn’t want to cause any trouble.”

The student was sent back to India and wasn’t able to retrieve his phone until he was out of U.S. airspace. He has to wait another three months before he can attempt to come back into the country.

“This is not about this young man. It’s about everyone. This has made it very clear to me that they are trying to stop artists from coming in,” Hyman said.

It’s a complicated issue, but according to rocker-turned-lawyer Matthew Covey, it always has been.

Covey — who co-founded the rock band Skulpey before working as a festival talent buyer, running Knitting Factory Records’ Amsterdam booking agency and managing The Klezmatics — and his bandmates formed a nonprofit called Tamizdat with the goal of facilitating artist mobility and international and cultural exchange “in a ’90s rock kind of way, not in a UNESCO way.”

Throughout his experience across various facets of the music industry, he saw firsthand that one of the major impediments of international touring was acquiring the necessary visas to visit the States.

“It was just too expensive, too complex,” said Covey, who initially helped artists who couldn’t afford an attorney to acquire a working visa. He eventually decided to attend law school himself to better serve international musicians who aspired to work in the U.S.

P and O work visas assigned to touring artists were created in the late ’80s to protect U.S. labor interests. The petition for such visas included about 10 pages of supplementary documentation verifying identities and U.S. tours, a process Covey said cost a band about $500 and the durations could be as long as a few years.

That’s no longer the case. Due to concerns about possible loopholes and bureaucrats wanting to address liabilities, the process has become more complex and a lot more expensive.

“You’re lucky if you can get the whole thing done for $6,000 now,” Covey said. “The durations tend to be very short, and the petitions tend to be easily 200 or 300 pages, often as many as 1,000 pages of evidence.

“There have been no substantive changes in the law. This is just how the law has been applied by the government.”

The complications, however, aren’t exclusive to one administration or political party. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks forced the government to tighten up on security and immigration, Covey said, and the process actually got worse during the Obama Administration with a “creeping growth of bureaucracy at the State Department and stricter profiling.”

There was some progress made during Biden’s Administration, which showed a “willingness to engage in a substantive discussion about how the process works and how to make it better,” Covey said.

But those conversations have since stalled, and further making matters worse is the time it takes to process visa petitions. They are now sent to one office in Texas, which are then distributed to offices in California, which is usually slower, or Vermont. The new procedure of having a centralized office dispersing requests to whichever location is capable sounds good on paper, but with the government workforce depleted during COVID and even more so with the current administration’s Department of Government Efficiency eliminating hundreds of thousands of positions, processing time can take as long as nine months, affecting how promoters and agents route a tour, unless an artist’s team pays thousands of dollars to expedite the request.

“No one that most of us work with is in a position to be filing a year in advance,” Covey said. “… The embassies haven’t really recovered from COVID and the de-staffing that happened under Trump — it’s a double whammy because Trump really deprioritized the foreign service. Almost all embassies around the world have been in a state of personnel crisis.”

Another reason embassies may not respond to artists quickly is because of their prioritization of refugees due to foreign conflicts, which is what has happened in Europe with Ukraine and Russia.

Contreras has experienced those delays when requesting visas for artists and has had to cancel shows because of it, which has prompted promoters and bookers in the Latin music space to submit petitions no later than six months in advance to ensure that their artist gets approval in time for a show.

Covey said he hasn’t noticed an increase in delays yet and added that despite concerns from artists like Young, musicians who were very vocal against Trump during his first term still managed to get visas.

However, current affairs and a lack of progress may deter acts from other countries, especially independent artists, to consider a U.S. tour, and mass deportations and this administration’s rhetoric could also see undocumented fans reconsider attending concerts.

“Going back at least a generation, the U.S. has always been a really difficult place to tour,” Covey said. “The payment is historically bad for independent artists. You add that to the current situation where the exchange rate is brutal. … Oh, and by the way, getting a visa, whether it’s a week-long or year-long residency, is now going to cost around $6,000 instead of $3,000.

“Oh, and you might be disappeared when you arrive, which may or may not be true, but I think for a lot of artists, that’s the tipping point,” he added. “The economics don’t work, and then you add the fear, I think we’re seeing individual artists just thinking, ‘Is it worth it?’”

That’s the multi-million-dollar question, one that could impact the entire industry, especially the small-capacity venues that rely on global, independent and rising talent to draw fans. The ethos of the American Dream is something citizens and non-citizens aspire to, but the obstacles and policies of today make it difficult for these groups to achieve.

Covey, however, still clings on to hope for a better future for international artists.

“The petition process isn’t serving anyone’s purposes,” he said. “If we are at a point in the future when the U.S. government is in a place to actually start thinking about immigration, which it hasn’t for six presidencies, I’m hopeful that having gone what we’re going through now, there’s going to be a greater willingness to think, ‘Wait, why is it that the EU makes it so easy? Why is it that Canada makes it so easy? It isn’t because they are nice; it’s because they have done the work to analyze what this does for the local economies and what it does for their creative sector, and that analysis has led them to say, ‘Tax the income and open the doors.’”

Artist teams looking for help with the visa process can contact Covey’s nonprofit at Tamizdat.org. For updated information and guidance on the work visa process, visit artistsfromabroad.org.