76 Percent of Consulates Are Fully or Partly Closed Even after Tests and Vaccinations

David J. BierPresident Bidenended President Trump ’s immigrant visa ban and allowed his nonimmigrant visa ban to expire on April 1. While this is progress, the president is inexplicably keeping 76 percent of consulates fully or partially closed to routine visa processing, affecting about 71 percent of all visa applicants. The consulate closures a re acting as a de facto ban on legal immigration and travel, even thoughall travelers to the country must receive negative COVID-19 tests and more than 551 million doses of the vaccinehave already been administered outside the United States.In March 2020, the State Department closed consulates supposedly to create procedures to safely process visa applications in light of the pandemic. Ithas said since July 22, 2020, that it is phasing back in routine visa services, yet so far, it has moved exceptionally slowly. Moreover, the department fails to publish aggregate statistics on its progress and only makes available information on nonimmigrant (i.e. temporary) visa availability inan online search tool that only returns results for individual consulates. The statistics in this post came from repeated searches of that tool.As of April 8, 2021, just 57 of 237 visa processing sites around the world (24 percent) were fully operational for nonimmigrant visa applicants, and just 97 (41 percent) allowed anything other than emergency applications (Table 1). Even many open sites have massive wait times for visas. The average wait was 95  day...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs