Effectively repeating myself from last month, the State Department remains a major barrier to reopening the United States to legal travel and immigration. As of mid‐​August, 62 percent of consulates remained fully or partially closed to anything other than emergency nonimmigrant visa appointments, and 40 percent are completely closed to non‐​emergency nonimmigrant visa appointments. The fully open consulates (38 percent) are reporting ever‐growing wait times—in many cases, six months or longer.

Consular officers have all received the opportunity to obtain COVID-19 vaccines since May. More than 4.9 billion COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide altogether this year. Moreover, all travelers to the United States must receive negative COVID-19 tests. Nonetheless, the State Department is keeping the doors closed to appointments, and it has refused to waive interviews in most cases or use virtual interviews. In fact, a State Department representative claimed doing so would be illegal, despite a statute directly authorizing in‐​person interview waivers during “unusual or emergent circumstances” like a pandemic.

As I explained in May, the State Department does not publish any accessible public information on immigrant visa appointment availability by consulate, but it is anecdotally similar to nonimmigrant availability. The department fails to publish aggregate statistics on its reopening progress and only makes available information on nonimmigrant (i.e. temporary) visa availability in an online search tool that only returns results for individual consulates. The statistics cited in this post come from querying that search tool on August 19.

Of the 237 issuing posts, only 89 were scheduling all tourist, student, and all other nonimmigrant (i.e. temporary) visa appointments as of August 19. 54 consulates were partially open. No appointments would be available outside of emergencies for at least one of those three categories. 94 consulates were completely closed to nonimmigrant visa appointments, meaning that in August, there were more consulates fully closed than fully open.

Table 1 shows the torturously slow progress of the Biden administration in getting the consulates back to normal. In April, 59 percent were fully closed. Now, 40 percent are fully closed—a change of less than 5 percentage points per month. At this rate, the State Department will at least partially reopen all of its consulates in May 2022. In April, 76 percent of consulates were partially closed. Now, 62 percent are partly closed—a rate of increase of barely 3 percentage points per month. At this rate, the State Department’s consulates will be fully open in early 2023.

For the open consulates, the wait times have grown from 95 days in April to 189 days in August for business and tourist traveler visas, from 25 to 38 days for student and exchange visitor visas, and from 40 to 51 days for all other nonimmigrant visa categories.

While these statistics only include figures for nonimmigrant visas, the situation for permanent immigrants is equally dire. As of July 31, the State Department reported it had a backlog of 547,193 immigrant visa applicants who were documentarily qualified but needed a visa appointment. It had scheduled just 33,306 for appointments for August. The backlog ballooned from 60,866 in 2019 and has even grown from 494,289 in April.

The Biden administration is failing to process immigrant and nonimmigrant visas and as a result is drastically cutting legal immigration and travel. It can and should waive interviews and take other measures to speed up processing.