Last month, President Biden allowed President Trump’s ban on nonimmigrants to expire, and he ended the similar ban on immigrants a few months early. But despite these formal policy changes, the State Department has made little progress in reopening consulates for nonimmigrant visa applicants. In the last almost month and a half, the share of consulates fully or partially closed to nonimmigrant appointments has fallen from 76 to 73 percent, and the share of consulates fully closed to nonimmigrant appointments also fell from 59 to 53 percent.

The State Department announced the consulate closures in March 2020 as an effort to mitigate exposure of COVID-19 to consular staff. Yet according to the State Department, nearly all of its roughly 77,000 staff abroad have had the opportunity to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine. As explained last month, the consulate closures are acting as a de facto ban on legal immigration and travel, even though all travelers to the country must receive negative COVID-19 tests and more than 1.3 billion doses of the vaccine have already been administered outside the United States.

The department fails to publish aggregate statistics on its 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 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 statistics in this post came from repeated searches of that tool. As of May 15, just 63 of 236 consular posts reported being fully open for visa processing, and 118 of 236 (50 percent) had no appointment availability for anything other than emergency appointments. Wait times were also extremely lengthy and getting longer. The average wait time at open consulates was 148 days for a visitor or business traveler visa (up from 95 days on April 8), 41 days for student or exchange visa (up from 25 days), and 54 days for all other visas (up from 40 days). Table 1 shows the full data for each consulate.

Even when the posts are open, they often will cancel appointments without notice purportedly to prioritize, in the State Department’s words, “travelers with urgent needs, foreign diplomats, mission‐​critical categories of travelers (such as those coming to assist with the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and workers who are essential to the American food supply), followed by students, exchange visitors, and some temporary employment visas.” The State Department can do far more to ensure timely visa issuances by waiving interviews for low risk applicants or allowing remote interviews (as USCIS does for refugees).