Kanye West is no longer welcome in Australia. The rapper’s visa has been revoked following a slew of hate comments and the release of “Heil Hitler,” the single he shared in May that has since been wiped from most digital streaming services.
West has been making antisemitic remarks and aligning himself with Nazi rhetoric for well over a year, but it was the song release in particular that encouraged officials to take a closer look. “He’s made a lot of offensive comments that my officials looked at again once he released the ’Heil Hitler’ song, and he no longer has a valid visa in Australia,” Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Bianca Censori, who has been married to West since 2022, was born and raised in Melbourne, which makes West eligible for a partner visa. Burke noted that West was not in possession of a temporary activity visa, which would be issued for the purpose of concert performances or other work-related obligations.
“He’s got family here … It wasn’t a visa for the purpose of concerts. It was a lower-level [visa] and the officials still looked at the law and said if you’re going to have a song and promote that sort of Nazism, we don’t need that in Australia,” Burke said. The ban is not permanent, but the law requires visa applications to be frequently reassessed. “I’m not taking away the way the act operates, but even for the lowest level of visa, when my officials looked at it, they cancelled that following the announcement of that song,” he said.
West is one of the few instances in which an Australian visa has been cancelled for reasons unrelated to public advocacy, Burke said. He mentioned the rapper in the context of recent visa conflicts with Hillel Fuld, an Israeli-American tech advocate who “publicly put in writing that Islamophobia is rational” and presumably intended to visit Australia on a speaking tour, though Burke’s department never received an application from him. If the request were to come through, Burke said, it’s unlikely he would approve it.
“If someone argued that antisemitism was rational, I would not let them come here on a speaking tour. And if someone has the same view of Islamophobia, I don’t want them here when the purpose of the visa is to give public speeches,” Burke said. “We have enough problems in this country already without deliberately importing bigotry.”
