The U.S. Consular Mission in China has pulled back on its policy announced in July 2010 allowing nonimmigrant visa applicants to choose which of the U.S. Consulates they prefer to apply at.
As background, in July 2010 the Mission announced that:
Residents of China may apply for a non-immigrant visa at any U.S. Consular Section in China, regardless of the province or city of residence. We have Consular Sections at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and the U.S. Consulates General in Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Shenyang.
I praised this policy as a way to reduce visa application times for applicants willing to spend the time and money for applicants willing to travel.
This policy was not exactly revolutionary. The State Department’s own guidelines have long encouraged Consulates to accept visa applications from any person physically present in the consular district, saying that such applications should “seldom, if ever” be refused on the basis that the applicant is not a resident. Yet the U.S. Consulates in China have routinely ignored that guidance over the years.
Now, the Mission has announced that:
all applicants in China will have the choice of applying for their nonimmigrant visas within the consular district where they reside, or at another U.S. consulate in China where the average wait time for the past month is shorter.
Get it? Now an applicant can’t choose another consulate if last month the average wait time was longer. So, for example, yesterday a client residing in Beijing who urgently needs to travel to the U.S. was assigned a September 2 appointment in Beijing (a 53 day wait). The Call Center refused to schedule an appointment in Shanghai, although the posted wait was just 3 days, apparently because last month the average wait in Shanghai was longer than in Beijing. Arghh!
The Mission justifies this policy as a way of “preventing wait times from getting too long in places of highest demand.” It’s true that this policy will reduce wait times for local applicants who can’t take the time and money to travel to another post. On the other hand, it increases wait times for applicants whose purpose of travel is urgent enough that they would be willing to travel but won’t be given the chance.
Another problem is that this policy seems to violate the spirit if not the letter of the State Department rules:
consular officers [have] discretionary authority to reject applications by persons “who are physically present in but not residents of the consular district, [but] the Department expects that such authority will seldom, if ever, be used.”
9 FAM 41.101 N2.; see 22 CFR 41.101(a). Now, the Mission has set a policy that a class of applicants may not apply at certain consulates, i.e., those consulates with higher average wait times during the prior month. This policy appears to violate State Department rule that the authority to refuse an application on the basis that the applicant does not reside locally should be left to the discretion of an individual consular officer and should rarely if ever be invoked.
In sum, the Mission’s policy has some pluses and some minuses, but it appears to reach beyond their authority. The real solution to reducing visa delays will need to include hiring a significant number of additional consular officers to adjudicate visa applications.
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