This is an update on a post from August 2021.

The State Department remains a major barrier to reopening the United States to legal travel and immigration. As of mid-October, 60 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, according to the State Department’s website. Nonimmigrant visas are used by temporary foreign workers, students, business travelers, tourists, and others.

Worse still, the State Department has essentially stopped making any progress toward fully reopening nonimmigrant (i.e. temporary) visa processing with only 2 percent of consulates entering fully open status since August, and no decrease at all in the share (40 percent) that are fully closed to nonemergency nonimmigrant appointments. The fully open consulates (40 percent) are reporting wait times of, in many cases, six months or longer for some nonimmigrant visas.

Consular officers have all received the opportunity to obtain COVID-19 vaccines since May. More than 6.6 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 nonimmigrant 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 (i.e. permanent) visa appointment availability by consulate. 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 October 14 and other earlier dates.

Of the 236 issuing posts, only 95 (40 percent) were scheduling all tourist, student, and all other nonimmigrant (i.e. temporary) visa appointments as of October 14. 94 consulates (40 percent) were completely closed to nonemergency, nonimmigrant visa appointments (Table 1). Meanwhile, 141 (60 percent) were partially closed. No appointments would be available outside of emergencies for at least one of those three categories.

Figure 1 shows the torturously slow progress of the Biden administration in getting the consulates back to normal. In April, 76 percent of consulates were partially closed. Now, 60 percent are partly closed, but there’s been just a 2‑percentage point improvement since August. In April, 59 percent were fully closed. Now, 40 percent are fully closed. But the bigger problem is that there has been no change in the share fully closed since August.

Based on the rate of opening between April and August, I had projected that the State Department might be fully reopened in early 2023, but now there is no consistent progress to report. Figure 2 shows the breakdown by type of visa. At 40 percent, student and exchange visitor visas had the lowest share of consulates fully closed to them. But in October, 60 percent of consulates were either not scheduling or only scheduling emergency B visa appointments for tourists and business travelers—again, just 2 percentage point improvement since August. At the same time, only 47 percent of consulates were not scheduling non-emergency appointments for work and other visas.

For the open consulates, the wait times have grown from 95 days in April to 192 days in August for business and tourist traveler visas. Waits for other visa categories have improved in recent months, but work and other visas still face 40-day waits, and students and exchange visitors see an average of 28 days waiting.

While these statistics only include figures for nonimmigrant visas, the situation for permanent immigrants is also dire. As of September 30, the State Department reported it had a backlog of 494,566 immigrant visa applicants who were documentarily qualified but needed a visa appointment— from 60,866 in 2019. It had scheduled just 25,675 for appointments for August. At this rate, it will take more than 19 months to process just the existing backlog (let alone the ones who apply in between).

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.