Imagine a woman learns she is pregnant. She wants her own mother from Colombia to visit the United States to see her grandchild and help her with new motherhood. That should be simple, but that Colombian grandmother currently must wait 874 days just to interview for a U.S. visa. Her grandchild might be in preschool by the time grandma gets her travel visa.
Tourist visas, called B1 or B2 visas, are for non-U.S. residents desiring to travel to the U.S. to conduct business, attend a professional conference, visit family, or take a vacation. Residents of 39 specific countries are eligible for a visa waiver, allowing a 90-day stay in the U.S. for business or tourism without having to apply for a visa.
People from the other 155 countries must interview at a U.S. embassy or consulate to obtain a travel visa. The average wait time for an appointment is 344 days — almost a year. And that’s just the average. If a Nigerian woman wants to visit her boyfriend in Atlanta, for example, she will have to wait 850 days just for an embassy appointment. A family from Guyana hoping to visit Disney World will wait 900 days for a visa appointment. A physician in Mexico wanting to attend an American medical conference next year won’t get an appointment for an average of 624 days, long after the meeting is over.
COVID-19 stifled tourism worldwide, but as the pandemic comes to an end, tourism should be returning to normal. Yet it is not. The State Department blames staffing shortages and the pandemic for the visa backlog, yet other Western European countries facing similar COVID-19 restrictions and tight labor markets are still able to process visitor and tourist visas in a few weeks.
One reason is that the U.S. still requires in-person interviews for all visas, while an Australian visa, for example, can be obtained online.
The U.S. could also hold interviews virtually via Zoom or another similar platform. Interviewers could work virtually from the U.S., avoiding any concerns over COVID-19, reserving interviews for the few applications with red flags or other concerns.
This problem resonates personally for me. My son’s girlfriend in Lagos, Nigeria, has a medical problem requiring evaluation and possible treatment at a level of care unavailable in her home country. Despite having an appointment and letter of necessity from a surgeon at a major U.S. academic medical center, an expedited visa appointment at the U.S. Consulate was denied, meaning a two-plus year wait. What if the medical problem won’t wait?
It doesn’t help that, for several weeks, the U.S. Consulate in Lagos did not have visa appointments available for any reason, including emergencies. To apply for an expedited emergency appointment, applicants must first secure a regular appointment, but with no appointments available, one cannot upgrade the original request to an emergency. This means a Nigerian with a dying relative in the U.S. could not even apply for an emergency visa.
When wait times grew a few years ago, then-President Barack Obama issued an executive order requiring that 80% of temporary visas be issued in less than 21 days. This order was rescinded by former President Donald Trump, and President Joe Biden has not reinstated it or otherwise fixed this situation. It is fully within Biden’s power to fix this, yet this problem has received so little media attention that the Biden administration may be unaware of it.
People from foreign countries, seeking to visit the U.S. legally, playing by the rules, and spending their own money while in the U.S. are told to wait in a multiyear line. It is fully within Biden’s power to remedy this by building the visa process back better.
Dr. Brian C. Joondeph is a physician and writer.
