,1,Briefing with Consular Affairs Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Visa Services Julie M. Stufft on the Current Status of Immigrant Visa Processing at Embassies and Consulates
Before COVID-19, the department issued approximately 10 million visas a year. Just over half a million, 500,000 of those, were immigrant visas while the rest were shorter-term, nonimmigrant visas. The pandemic, though, has severely constrained us in two ways: It’s drastically decreased the number of people we can safely move through our facilities overseas; and just like the majority of workplaces in the United States, it has also reduced the number of staff we can safely have in the office at the same time.
The department has instructed our embassies and consulates overseas to follow federal government-wide requirements based on CDC protocols in terms of masking, hygiene, physical distancing, other measures to keep applicants and our personnel as safe as possible. As you can imagine, the guidance differs based on the location of the post and how well the pandemic is contained in that location. I don’t know if any of you have visited a visa waiting room in one of our embassies or consulates overseas. They vary according to location, of course, but in many places, even most places, they were built to hold hundreds of people at a time so that we could serve thousands of people in any given day.
So given these challenges, we’re taking three key steps to address the situation.
First, we’ve prioritized the processing of immigrant visas, full stop, at every post. As there is capacity, these will be the first visas adjudicated. Among those, we will continue to prioritize the processing of immigrant visas for spouses and children of U.S. citizens, including fiance(e) visas not subject to regional restrictions.
Second, we’re constantly seeking creative ways to increase the number of immigrant visa appointments that we can offer safely. A number of our posts have taken various steps to do this. And given that our overseas physical spaces are quite different, many of these solutions, of course, are context-specific. One embassy, though, has outfitted alternative spaces within the embassy complex to create physical distance – physically distanced workspaces to process more applications. Other embassies and consulates are cross-training personnel who may typically work on other types of visas so that they can process immigrant visas as well. As we collect and share these best practices, we’ll find new ways, we hope, to serve as many applicants as we can safely.
I do want to emphasize that we are committed to transparently sharing the current status of our worldwide visa operations. By way of statistics, in January 2020 there were about 75,000 immigrant visa cases pending at the National Visa Center ready for interviews. Thirteen months later, in February 2021, there were 473,000 – about six to seven times greater. The snapshot gives you an idea of how much longer the line has gotten since the beginning of the pandemic. It’s important to note, too, that this number doesn’t include the entirety of that queue. It doesn’t include cases already at embassies and consulates that have not yet been interviewed or applicants still gathering the necessary documents before they can be interviewed, and also, of course, petitions awaiting USCIS approval.