US working to reduce visa wait time, open slots

NEW DELHI: The wait times for US visas are expected to move towards normalcy by mid-2023 though some progress has already been made through changes in rules and the opening of 100,000 slots for H and L work visas, a senior US embassy official said on Thursday.

After issuing 82,000 student visas for India this year, the priority now is reducing the wait times for non-immigrant work visas such as the H and L categories, including the coveted H-1B visas, B-1 business visa, B-2 tourism visa, and visas for crews of shipping companies and airlines.

The US will initially focus “aggressively” on applicants in these categories using the “drop box” facility, or those who already were issued a US visa and are exempted from interviews, before taking up the case of first-time applicants. The effort, the official said, will be on reducing the wait times as much as possible and moving towards greater normalcy by June-july 2023.

Priority will also be given to H-1B visa holders in the US who want to visit India for family reunions, and then the focus will shift to first-time applicants.

Unlike other sections of the US state department, the Bureau of Consular Affairs — which is responsible for issuing visas — is funded by the revenues it generates. As the Covid-19 pandemic affected visa operations and revenues, the bureau had to right size. Once visa applications, including from India, registered a huge jump, it has been working to increase staffing.

The onboarding, training and deployment of the staff overseas will take some more time because “government bounces back slower” and staffing in India is expected to be at 100% by summer 2023, the official said. The US is also resorting to steps such as using temporary workers and sending Indian applications to remote locations for processing, especially for those using the drop box facility.

“Opening the 100,000 additional slots for H and L visas cut the wait time, which was more than a year earlier, to about half. The wait time for those using the drop box for B-1 and B-2 visas continues to be several months. We will see progress over the next nine months,” the official said.

Though the US state department’s website for visa appointment wait times shows firsttime applicants in New Delhi for B-1 and B-2 visas face a wait time of 925 days, the official indicated that the actual time would be less.

“India is the number one priority for Washington now... There are lots of applicants in all categories only in India, and that’s why it’s a priority,” the official said, acknowledging that experts were unprepared for the rate at which the demand for visas had come in following the easing of the pandemic. The experts had anticipated that there would be a surge in demand only in 2025, the official added.

The US side expects applications for all types of visas in India to increase to about 100,000 a month — or about 1.2 million annually — by 2023, making the country the second largest for visa operations after China. “But we are seeing signs of progress. The daily cases being handled are higher than the number of people applying by several hundreds,” the official said.

Certain changes in rules have meant more Indians are eligible for the drop box facility to get an interview waiver. For instance, those who had a US visa that expired in the past four years can use the drop box facility while applying for a new B-1 or B-2 visa. Students with an expired US visa too can use the drop box facility with certain conditions.