GREEN MOUNTAIN FALLS — July 10 was the perfect night for musician Amir Amiri’s sold out show, one of four he was scheduled to play at the annual summer Green Box Arts Festival in Green Mountain Falls.
The day’s high near 90 had cooled to a balmy 66 degrees. The gravel path leading to James Turrell’s “Skyspace,” a stone cube on the hillside where Amiri would play, was silvery under the full moon. Inside the venue, Amiri’s instrument of choice, an Iranian string instrument called a santur, would vibrate endlessly around the echoey room. There was only one problem: Amiri wasn’t there.
Amiri hadn’t received a visa to play in the U.S. despite seven months of petitioning and paying fees, the standard, though increasingly strenuous, process for international musicians who want to perform in the U.S.
America has maintained a uniquely burdensome bureaucracy for artists, athletes and entertainers for decades, beginning in the early 1990s, when Congress, at the urging of Hollywood labor unions, splintered artist visas off from the standard H1-B foreign workers visa into O and P visas, for exceptionally talented individuals or groups, respectively.
The new requirements came with piles of new paperwork and ever-increasing fee structures, the most recent of which occurred last year, when the standard filing fee jumped to $510 from $460 for some regularly processed visas, all the way up to $1,615 for others, and the expedited fee was bumped up to $2,805 from $2,500.
The “Skyspace,” designed by artist James Turrell and installed for the Green Box Arts Festival in 2022, overlooks the town center of Green Mountain Falls. Daily shows are open to the public, and special musical performances take place inside during the annual arts festival. (Photo by David Lauer, provided by Green Box Arts)But the U.S. is also home to huge, culturally hungry audiences and vast market potential, so most musicians hoping to make it big are willing to pay up and get in line.
Until recently, that is, when the typical red tape became tangled up in far-reaching executive orders, including those having to do with immigration, as well as policies affecting transgender people, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric around making Canada the “51st state” and tariffs.
Backlash has been felt on both sides of the border, with some artists refusing to play in the U.S., and others being denied entry.
“I mean honestly, I have toured artists in many, many, many countries, including China, Russia and Australia,” said Barbara Scales, founder of Latitude 45 Arts Promotion, the Canadian company that represents Amiri. “There is no country that I’ve ever had to deal with that has been more complicated, more expensive, more time consuming and more demanding.”
Boycotting, backing out and getting banned
Amiri was born in Tehran, Iran, though he is a Canadian citizen, and Scales said she wasn’t sure if his birthplace would affect his chances at the border (though she suspected it would).
Canadian musicians can get a “tiny headstart” on their application to play in the U.S., according to Scales. That headstart amounts to about one week, if they apply for their visa through the Canadian Federation of Musicians, which compiles all of their documentation (for a fee of $125-$150 Canadian dollars). That information is folded into the I-129 form, or the “petition for a nonimmigrant worker,” and sent to one of two processing centers in the U.S., one in California, the other in Vermont.
U.S. Customs and Immigration’s “goal” cycle time for I-129 visas is two weeks to two months, according to their website. The historic median for processing those visas ranges from one week to four months.
The current processing time at the California processing center, where Amiri’s application was sent, is one year.
Scales said that this time last year they could count on getting an artist into the country within a few months’ time. Now, with six- to 12-month turnaround times, she said, “it’s not something that we’ve been able to really figure out.”
In a statement emailed to The Colorado Sun, the American Federation of Musicians said that the processing time for visa petitions has become so delayed that artists are being forced to cancel tours.
“The impact of these delays and the economic losses, while impacting the lives of artists, should also be of major concern to the cities and states affected,” the statement reads. “U.S. immigration policies are not only hurting touring Canadian musicians. The American economy and public suffers too. Arts and entertainment are economic drivers.”
That cultural slowdown is occurring all over the compass. German violinist Christian Tetzlaff canceled an eight-city tour in February, stating that he couldn’t imagine playing in America unless the government reversed course, and Hungarian-born pianist Sir András Schiff backed out of his U.S. performances citing Trump’s “unbelievable bullying” on the world stage, according to the New York Times.
Up north, Shred Kelley, a Canadian indie band that canceled their tour due to fears of being detained or stuck in a “bureaucratic limbo,” they told Rolling Stone, and Canadian singer-songwriter Bells Larsen, who ditched his U.S. shows after reading about U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement’s policy of recognizing two biological sexes. Larsen’s latest album chronicles his transition from his assigned gender.
At the same time, a number of high-profile Mexican performers have been forced to cancel shows due to their visas being revoked, like Julión Álvarez, who was previously barred from the U.S. for five years due to money laundering charges (the charges were dropped in 2022), and Los Alegres del Barranco, a corrido group whose visa was revoked for showing a photo of a cartel leader at a recent concert.
Other Mexican groups, like Grupo Firme, have seen their visa process stall without explanation. Michelada Fest, a Latin music festival in Chicago, was canceled this year due to visa uncertainty for its main artists.
Festival attendees gather under Patrick Shearn’s “Off the Beaten Path,” a large-scale installation created for the Green Box Art Festival in 2025. (Photo by Jeff Kearney)Time is of the essence
Between the long processing times, increasingly expensive application process and fear at the border, many musicians are opting out of the process for now.
Amiri, though, is not one of those artists.
As an artist-in-residence at the 2023 Green Box Arts Festival, Amiri was familiar with the cozy mountainside community, and applied for his visa in December 2024.
That’s when the emails began between Scales, Amiri’s agent, and Scott Levy, executive director of Green Box Arts.
There is no country that I’ve ever had to deal with that has been more complicated, more expensive, more time consuming and more demanding.
— Barbara Scales, founder of a Canadian music promotion, on working in America
On Dec. 16, Scales wrote that the process had begun, letting Levy know that it would cost $1,000 Canadian dollars and an additional $300 U.S. dollars for the visa.
Five months later, Scales emailed Levy again, stressed that they hadn’t heard any news of the processing. “We are six weeks from Amir’s entry date. And we have no visa,” Scales wrote. She added that they could apply for an expedited visa, which would cost almost $3,000.
Ultimately they chose not to apply for the expedited visa.
“That would have been half of the total fee on this concert, out of which also we had to pay with the airfare and the original visa application,” Scales said. “It would have meant going home with very little in its pocket.” Canadian artists who make more than $15,000 while in the U.S. are also required to pay taxes on their earnings, unlike most foreign workers, who benefit from treaties to prevent double taxation.
A week later, Scales wrote again, suggesting that Levy and Amiri contact U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s office to advocate for Amiri’s entrance to Homeland Security.
“What they can do for a Canadian citizen, Tehran-born applicant, we shall see,” Scales wrote, thanking Levy and the team for their support.
Three days before the scheduled performance, Amiri sent an email. He’d spoken with Bennet’s office, which confirmed that Amiri and his team had done everything right. They were just waiting for a call from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services.
They’re still waiting.
Amiri had tacked multiple performances in the U.S. onto the one visa application, one of the ways that artists can make up for the overhead of just getting into the country, Scales said. He is still hoping to play in the U.S. later this year.
On July 14, a caseworker from Bennet’s office called Amiri to let him know that he would not receive the visa in time for the second day of Green Box performances. Those concerts were scheduled for July 11.
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