H-1B Worker Domestic Visa Renewal Pilot to Start in January (2)

A limited number of H-1B specialty occupation workers will be able to renew their visas in the US as soon as January, State Department officials announced.

The stateside visa renewal pilot program is one of multiple measures the State Department is looking to add or continue with the aim of driving down wait times for travel to the US, officials told reporters Monday.

The agency is also working to extend interview waivers for certain temporary visas and offer a digital visa for travel to the US. Discretion for consular offices to waive interviews for visa applicants who would otherwise be required to appear in person has been key to improving efficiency, supporters say.

The rollout of the H-1B domestic visa renewal pilot will be limited to just 20,000 participants at first. That option would allow those H-1B holders to renew their visas by mailing them to the State Department rather than travel outside the US and face uncertain wait times to secure an appointment at a US consular office before returning.

A Federal Register notice with full details is expected to be published next month.

“We really need to get proof of concept that it works before we can extend it to a larger group,” Deputy Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs Julie Stufft told reporters Monday. “This is a huge change for folks who live here and previously would have had to leave the United States.”

But extending interview waivers and reducing pent-up backlogs for travel to the US are more significant to ongoing efforts to reduce wait times. Backlogs have persisted in some countries—including Mexico, India, and Colombia—even after a post-Covid processing rebound that saw total visas issued hit near-record levels in 2022.

Visa Interviews

Stufft called interview waivers a “tremendous help” to the State Department’s efforts to process visa applications efficiently. The Trump administration gave consulates temporary authority to use waivers for certain visa categories during the pandemic, and the Biden administration has extended that authority multiple times.

With the current waiver authority set to expire at the end of December, the travel industry and a coalition of business and immigration advocates have pressed the government to renew the waiver option again, calling the waivers “an indispensable discretionary tool” to improve efficiency of consular offices.

About half of all temporary visas—including work visas—were issued last year without an in-person interview.

The legal authority for renewing the waivers is clear, Stufft said, but it requires concurrence from the Department of Homeland Security. The agencies are having a “robust conversation” on what is and isn’t working at ports of entry, she said. State isn’t currently considering an option like remote interviews as it prioritizes waivers and the visa renewal pilot instead, officials said.

“Everyone is very focused on making sure we resolve this issue by the end of the year,” Stufft said. “I feel pretty good about where that’s headed.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson said DHS is involved in interagency discussions on next steps involving temporary interview waivers but couldn’t offer other details.

Details Needed

The pilot offering domestic visa renewal options to temporary visa holders for the first time in nearly two decades is still undergoing review at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Advocates will be looking for further details when a Federal Register notice is released on exactly how the initial pilot participants are selected when a Federal Register notice is released, said Shev Dalal-Dheini, government relations director at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“How are you going to make that determination? A lottery? Will people have to race and wait to get in line?” she said. “There’s a number of questions we still have.”

Without the domestic renewal option, workers whose visas were expiring have had to get an appointment for a visa stamp at a consulate or embassy abroad, with pandemic-exacerbated delays stranding many outside the country for months at a time. Especially high backlogs in countries like India, the biggest source of H-1B workers, are a major headache for workers and their employers.

Some H-1B workers have pursued work-arounds such as traveling to nearby countries with fewer backlogs—such as Canada—to secure visa appointments. The domestic renewal option would help consular offices in those countries as well as India, Stufft said.

Both the interview waivers and domestic visa renewals would allow consular staff to focus limited resources on cases that require more scrutiny, said Cecilia Esterline, an immigration research analyst at the Niskanen Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank that advocates on public policy issues such as immigration with a market-based approach.

“Consular wait times have been a lingering pain point for American companies that need workers they cannot find domestically and for those that rely on foreign visitor expenditure,” she said.

High Wait Times

Across the globe, the average wait time to secure a visa appointment for travel to the US fell to 130 days last year, a drop of 70 days from fiscal year 2022. But high wait times remain in certain countries. Official wait times in Bogota, Colombia, for example, exceed 600 days.

The State Department considers acceptable wait times to be closer to 90 days.

The backlog at those consular offices likely “goes beyond a hangover from Covid,” Stufft said. “We’re seeing a demand signal here that is way higher than we would expect given the amount of work they’ve done,” she said.

The National Immigration Forum applauded the State Department “for taking these commonsense steps to make visa processing more efficient,” NIF President and CEO Jennie Murray said Tuesday.

“Doing so will help American businesses as well as visa holders and applicants,” she said.