USA Visa: Goal is to reduce queue to less than 100 days – 11/29/2023 – World

The waiting time to obtain a tourist or business visa for the USA in Brazil exceeded 600 days in June, but has been falling since then – currently, it is 141 days at the São Paulo consulate. Despite the improvement, the time is still considered long by the American government, which plans to accelerate the process next year.

“I think we can still reduce it further, so that orders made by Brazilians anywhere we have a consulate have a waiting time of less than one hundred days. This is certainly our objective”, he tells Sheet Julie Stufft, assistant secretary for visas at the US Department of State.

Globally, the average waiting time last year to schedule an interview for a tourist or business visa for those who had never obtained one before was 200 days, well below that recorded in October 2022 in Brazil, when this time was 400 , average. Recently, however, this number fell to 140 days, in line with data from the consulate in São Paulo.

The long queue even created an informal market for selling interview appointments at consulates, which in turn feeds the problem. Stufft claims that the American mission in Brazil is aware of the “jeitinho”, and that it is trying to react.

“Is very difficult [lidar com isso] because, legally speaking, anyone can schedule an interview if they have a visa application form. But we are trying to avoid this, which we call ‘visa services’. That’s one of the reasons we have such long wait times in some places,” she says.

The State Department released this Tuesday (28) the most recent data on visa issuance, relating to the 2023 fiscal year (period that runs from October 2022 to October of the following year). In Brazil, there was a 55% increase in requests compared to the previous year.

Of the total, almost 1 million tourism and business visas were issued in the country in fiscal year 2023 – a record, according to Stufft. The number is also almost double that recorded in the previous period, when 625 thousand travel authorizations were granted.

“Brazil is a success story for us,” she says, highlighting that the consular operation in the country has increased the workload, including weekends, to meet demand.

Even so, Brazil continues to be one of the places with the highest number of orders, along with India, Mexico and Colombia. The Secretary of the State Department does not attribute the volume to a pent-up demand due to the pandemic, but rather to a great interest among Brazilians to visit, study and work in the USA.

“We will monitor Brazil closely to ensure that waiting times continue to fall. The leaders of our consular section in Brazil are in Washington now to consult on this,” says Stufft, when asked if there are other initiatives planned to speed up the queue in the country.

You can check the waiting time for various types of visas at the different US consulates in the country on the State Department website. The tourism ones are classified B1/B2.

In total, the American government issued around 10.4 million visas to non-immigrants in fiscal year 2023, around 2 million more than recorded in 2019, the last year without the impact of Covid and used as a parameter for the resumption of normality due to the department’s bureaucracy. There were 8 million authorizations for tourism and business and 600 thousand for students.

“If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say there have never been so many people in the past who wanted to visit the USA and were able to do so immediately as there are today,” says Stufft.

To further speed up the process, there are two pilot programs being tested. The first is the permission for people who already live in the country to renew their visa or request a new one without having to return to their place of origin.

From December to February, around 20 thousand people will have access to the program. Priority will be given to those whose visa is closest to expiring. For now, Brazilian citizens are not on the list, but the idea is that the possibility will be expanded to more nationalities in the future.

The US is also testing electronic visas, eliminating the need for a paper document attached to the passport. A pilot of this program was carried out in Dublin, Ireland, chosen due to the existence of an official American post at the local airport to check authorization. The test was carried out with long-stay US visas, not tourism and business visas.

The idea is that, in the future, an application on a cell phone will be sufficient to prove possession of a visa, says Stufft. She says, however, that it should take at least 18 months for this program to gain scale. There is no prediction of when Brazilians will be able to access it.