By Parker Yamasaki, The Colorado Sun | 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.
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, . . .
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Go here to read more about the costs, time, red-tape and MAYBE you’ll get in:
https://coloradosun.com/2025/07/16/amir-amiri-green-box-arts-show-canceled/
Parker Yamasaki began her work covering arts and culture at The Colorado Sun as a Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellow and Dow Jones News Fund intern. She has freelanced for the Chicago Reader, Newcity Chicago, and DARIA, among other publications, and had a short stint as a culture editor at Iceland’s only English-written newspaper at the time, The Reykjavík Grapevine. Parker was born and raised in California and has lived all over the Southwest.
[Thanks to Jamie Krutz for alerting us to this problem. Https://www.jamiekrutz.com]
September 25, 2025| Music-Related Business| Barb Dye