Julie Stufft is the United States Visa Services for the Bureau of Consular Affairs. At this briefing attended by United States Bureau Chief OLUKOREDE YISHAU, Stufft discusses updates in visa processing worldwide. The briefing was organized by the Washington Foreign Press Center. Excerpts:
Update you on U.S. visa processing
I’m just looking at the data from our Fiscal Year 2023, which runs from October to October. So our fiscal year in the U.S. Government just ended, and I can share those statistics with you. We will also have updated statistics I think for the calendar year, which may be of interest as well.
Our visa processing in Fiscal Year 2023, we had set goals to return to pre-pandemic processing, which for us was 2019, like most organizations. In that – in 2019, we issued about 8.5 million visas, U.S. visas. This was significantly more than we were able to do last year, and of course during the pandemic we – our operations were very limited. So we thought that it was an ambitious goal to look at 2019 numbers and try to get back to that level.
In fact, at the end of the fiscal year we realized this month that we did significantly more than that. Our overseas posts issued more than 10.5 million visas, so 2 million more than we had anticipated being able to (inaudible), and almost hitting the highest level that we’ve ever done in any year at our overseas missions. Half of our overseas missions set their own record for that country for adjudication of visas of that country, and that includes several that are represented here at this briefing. And worldwide, we set records for visa adjudication for work visas and for student visas, as well (inaudible) categories.
I would say that if I had to sum this up in one phrase, I would say that more people who are seeking to visit the United States today can visit the United States immediately than ever before in the past; that is, there are more people who hold U.S. visas that are valid or can travel without visa status to the U.S. tomorrow if they board a flight than at any time in our history. Very, very excited to be able to say that.
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Visa Processing in Nigeria
Let me take the one about the 12-month wait first. You mentioned that 12-month waits for a visa to apply to go and visit family, or frankly any reason to go to the United States, is too long. And I cannot tell you how strongly I agree with you on that. Twelve months is not something that I can justify, because it’s not what we want to happen. We would much rather see wait times be a week to two weeks, as they are in about half of our posts overseas. So when we see these very long wait times, a year or more, these are an anomaly that comes out of the pandemic but the delays in some cases that I mentioned because of the demand.
Let me talk about Nigeria specifically. Nigeria is one of the places – we have two posts in Nigeria – where we have processed more visas this year, I think issued more visas this year, than I think any other year previously. We can double-check on that, but huge gains have been made in Nigeria to accommodate the demand. It’s a very high-demand place for us – and not just for visitors but for students and workers in many categories. So I see that the wait times are coming down in Nigeria. I know that they’ve been doing incredible work there to make that happen. And that is our goal for sure, to make those wait times go down.
Expanding to the rest of Africa, I do want to highlight that we issued more student visas for African – in the Africa region this year than ever before. That’s something that we’re extremely proud of, and we hope to continue that trend. A lot of it is just very high demand for student experience in the United States from students in Africa, which is also great. But as we work through the wait times and make sure that we can manage this, we are absolutely placing the Africa region as a priority in that to make sure that we keep wait times low and make it possible for people to apply.
The 12-month wait time you mentioned, of course our fear with this – and many of our colleagues in the U.S. Government have the same fear – is that people will choose not to come to the United States because of a wait time like that. They may pivot to another country to study or to work or choose a different location for their vacation, and we want to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Plan for 2024
Let me also say what we’re working on for 2024 in this next year. Obviously, we – we’re still working very hard on reducing wait time. In some – say, a handful – of our overseas locations, we still have very high wait times, some exceeding a year still for one category of visa, which is a first-time visitor, someone who needs an interview for their visa. All other categories have low wait times globally. But we’re very focused on the first-time visitor interview wait time. And what’s very interesting to us is that many of the places where we’ve set records for visa production this year are the same places where we still have really high wait time. This just indicates a very high level of demand, and we’re going to use this year to really get control of that in these five or six places with very high wait times.
We have a couple of other innovations that you’ve heard me maybe talk about before that I want to highlight for you that we’re doing in 2024. One is domestic renewal of visas. This is being run as a pilot starting next month and into the beginning of the calendar year, 2024. What this means is that people who are living and working in the United States on a long-term work visa do not have to leave the United States to apply for their next visa or to renew their visa. They would be able to send it to us here in Washington, have it renewed without leaving the country and sent back to them in their own passport.
This is a huge undertaking; we’re very excited about it. We’re starting small with a pilot of 20,000 visas in December, January, February, and we look forward to opening that to more categories of workers living in the United States in the rest of 2024. This is a very exciting programme. We did do it in the past; the last time we did it was about 20 years ago, and now we’re ready to restart that.
We’re also very focused on waiving visa interviews where we can, specifically for prior travelers. So U.S. border policy has been this year to allow interviews to be waived for visa applicants who previously traveled to the United States, and we hope to continue that in the next year.
Paperless visa
And I will highlight that we did our first small-scope pilot of a paperless visa, which means that the visa process is the same, but there is a – there’s no physical visa in someone’s passport. This is still just – piloted this for the first time, so this is not something that’s going to be happening in the next year. It’ll take us probably 18 months to have widespread use of this – or longer – but it’s very exciting that we’ve had this first step where we’ve actually seen visitors come through, and in this case they were immigrant visas, without a physical paper in their passport. That will ultimately in the future, as some other countries do, require an app or something that allows people to show their visa status without physical paper in their passport. We’re very, very excited about that.
So just to summarize what I’ve said to this point before your questions, we’ve had really staggering levels of visa adjudication production this year worldwide. We’ve had good progress on wait times. The average global wait times have reduced – last year they were about 200 days average worldwide, and then a few months ago 150 days, and now we’re closer to 140 days, and that continues to drop. We’re very excited and we’ve got more work to do on that, and we’re really focused on these innovations that will fundamentally change the way we do visa work in our U.S. missions overseas.
What paperless visa means
This is the paperless visa. Yes, so our process is identical to the way it is. It’s not a – it’s not a visa that’s adjudicated electronically. It’s not processed electronically. Someone may still need an interview or to come and speak to a consular officer, but ultimately there will be no piece of paper. This saves everyone – I can’t tell you – a tremendous amount of effort in getting these very secure visa foils shipped out to all of our posts overseas, and this is just basically a very modern way to speak to the airlines and to the ports of entry at airports and the State Department all together to make this happen. We wanted to do this, frankly, for a long time, but now we have the full ability electronically to message someone’s visa status, and this is going to be a huge help for these applicants going forward.
We’ve already done a small pilot, now we’re branching out to other types of visas. We started with our embassy in Dublin was where we first tried this, because there is an airport facility there with U.S. officials who could check if someone boarded a plane, but we fully expect to expand that regionally and throughout the world. It will be piece by piece, but we’ll keep you updated on that.
