Dear friends,

we are sorry to announce that we are forced to cancel our short summer US tour scheduled from Aug. 23rd to Sept. 2nd. since our VISA petition has not been processed yet.

Our application has been timely filed with the competent authority of the USCIS starting last April, and we’ve done everything we could, but at this point there is no way of doing consular procedures in time – as the Visa petition approval hasn’t showed up yet.

We are still shocked about this. Red Wine has toured the USA on a VISA several times before – and as recently as last year – but this is the first time we have had to cancel a tour, and for reasons totally beyond our control.

What happened this year? This is the explanation, according to Covey Law, a full service immigration law firm:

In the last year we have seen significant increases in the fees USCIS charges to process O and P visa petitions for touring artists—increases that we were told would help ensure efficient processing. And when USCIS announced that going forward all petitions would be filed with a service center in Texas, we were told that this would facilitate more timely and reliable adjudication. Unfortunately, it has become clear that the processing times of O and P petitions are now less consistent than at any time since the creation of the O and P visa classifications in 1990. If not addressed, the current processing policy will make it massively harder to tour international artists in the U.S.

This is what has happened: USCIS has two service centers that adjudicate O and P artist visa petitions, one in Vermont and one in California. (…) However, in December USCIS required that all petitions be filed with their Texas Service Center, and starting in May, they began to randomly divvy up all cases between the California and Vermont service centers. The impact of this change is that the processing times at both Services Centers has become wildly irregular.

Vermont is processing most O and P petitions in 8-10 weeks, on average, but some are taking more than 12. Meanwhile, California is processing so slowly that we don’t even know how slowly, because every case we know of that has been filed since May is still pending or has had to be upgraded to Premium Processing (…) By their own estimation, California is currently taking 5-6 months (…) and in all likelihood you will be forced to pay an additional $2805 to ensure processing within any reasonable timeframe.

This means that when an artist is considering touring in the U.S., almost regardless of when they start the visa process, they will need to budget an extra $2805 for Premium Processing. This is effectively the most significant increase in the budget required for U.S. visas in 34 years, and a massive blow to any U.S. organization that works with international artists.

We are incredibly sorry about this and apologize with our friends, fans and promoters, hoping to see you all next time around.