NEW YORK – Every wedding involves a flurry of last-minute preparations, but Sunil Dhar has an unusual task on his to-do list when his youngest son marries next June: making sure everyone is in the correct country.
The Dhars are from the San Francisco Bay Area. But the wedding will take place almost 1,000 kilometers to the north, in Blaine, Washington, near the Arch of Peace, a monument located on the border between the United States and Canada with a park that spans both countries. The park is considered a neutral zone, where people from both countries can mix without going through immigration checks.
It’s the only way the bride’s parents, who live in Delhi, can attend. They would need tourist visas to enter the United States, and the waiting time in India to apply is almost a year.
So the wedding will take place in the southern half of Washington Park, in a room called the American Kitchen. The parents of the bride and other relatives, who already have a Canadian visa, will enter the park from the north side, in British Columbia. The parking lot on the US side is as far south as you can get without having to show ID and immigration papers.
Dhar, 65, said she didn’t want a repeat of visa-related no-shows during her eldest son’s wedding last year in the Bay Area, especially when it involves her soon-to-be daughter-in-law’s family.
“It’s a memory that lasts a lifetime,” Dhar said. “And I wouldn’t want her not to have her parents there at her wedding.”
It’s not just India. Travelers from all over the world face long wait times to apply for visitor visas to the United States. Applicants from Brazil and Mexico must wait more than a year. In Colombia, the wait lasts until 2025.
The delays are emotionally affecting families. Many immigrants do not know when they will be able to see their elderly parents. The celebrations have been postponed because loved ones cannot come to the United States.
US citizens can travel to more than 100 countries without a visa. But billions of people around the world who are not citizens of one of the 40 countries in the US visa waiver program must apply before they can visit the United States.
This document, called visa B1/B2is usually granted for personal or business travel, and usually requires an in-person appointment at a US embassy or consulate to submit digital photographs and fingerprints, and be interviewed. In this interviewapplicants must demonstrate that they have strong ties to and intent to return to their home countries and that they have legitimate reasons for coming to the United States. This step is where the bottleneck has formed..
In 2020, US consular offices around the world closed their operations and stopped processing applications as the coronavirus spread. When the applications started coming in again, officials found themselves embroidered.
“During the two years that offices around the world were closed, a huge backlog was created”explained Annelise Araujo, a lawyer specializing in immigration. “And I think they don’t have enough resources to catch up”.
At the same time, in the United States, a similar pandemic-related rush of passport applications has overwhelmed understaffed passport centers, causing delays of 10 to 13 weeks in the issuance and renewal of new passports. .
The State Department stated that its objective was reach pre-pandemic staffing levels at overseas visa offices by end of September.
“Even before the pandemic, countries like Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and India were our largest operations in the world. So we have increased staffing at those locations,” Julie M. Stufft, deputy assistant secretary for visa services, said in an interview. “Last year we issued more tourist visas in places like Mexico and Brazil than before the pandemic. This year the same will happen with India”.
Stufft said the department would also launch a pilot program this fall to allow certain work visa renewals within the United States, allowing some applicants to avoid the lengthy and costly need to leave the country to reapply. This program, he stressed, will help reduce the workload of overseas visa officers: “We can take that work off their shoulders so they can serve more B1/B2 applicants for the first time.”
The department also has waived the interview requirement for those who have obtained a visa in the last two yearsa solution that, according to Stufft, is the “preferred to mitigate waiting times”.
All other applicants still require an interview.
As domestic travel begins to return to pre-pandemic levels, the number of international visitors continues to lag. International arrivals to the United States in 2022 were nearly 40% below pre-pandemic levels, according to data from the National Office of Travel and Tourism.
Brazil, India, Mexico and Colombia – where applicants are currently experiencing the worst delays – are among the top sources of international visitors to the United States, according to data from the National Office of Travel and Tourism. More than 2.4 million tourist visas were granted to citizens of these four nations in fiscal year 2019.
International visitors added $239 billion to the US travel economy before the pandemic. This dropped to $83 billion in 2021, according to the latest available data. The travel industry is pressing management to do more about the delay.
“We have people who want to come spend their money here and we are basically putting a ‘No Trespassing’ sign in front of them.. We are basically saying that the United States is closed to these travelers. And that is extraordinarily damaging,” said Geoff Freeman, director of the US Travel Association, a trade group.
Congress has also gotten involved. A bipartisan group of six senators wrote a letter in February to the Bureau of Consular Affairs, asking it to address the issue of visa backlogs.
“Although more visitors from across the country are coming to Nevada and helping our tourism industry recover, international visitor numbers remain below pre-Covid levels. We have more work to do to attract international tourists again,” said Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen, who chairs the Senate tourism subcommittee and was one of the lawmakers who signed the letter.
Por Saurabh Datar
The New York Times