It's Nearly Impossible to Apply for a U.S. Visa
The State Department's interview scheduling website has been down for weeks. Is that on purpose?
For at least a couple of weeks, thousands of applicants for nonimmigrant U.S. visas have been seeing the following message when visiting a State Department website used to schedule interviews: “The scheduling portal is currently experiencing technical issues, and applicants may encounter errors with the system during this time. We apologize for the inconvenience as we work to resolve the problem.”
“May encounter errors” is misleading phrasing. In fact, such errors happen most of the time, according to applicants I’ve heard from and several Reddit threads like this one and this one. In them, users share their frustration with the system, and some speculate that the Trump administration is “purposely throttling” the website, ustraveldocs.com, which serves several world regions, including Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and is managed by a private contractor, CGI Federal Inc.
Another website, usvisascheduling.com — used by applicants from India and several other countries and run by the same company — hasn’t been reliable, either. While Reddit users say that both sites are known for glitching out frequently, the current problems on ustraveldocs.com have made it nearly impossible for legitimate travelers to apply for visas.
Things are even worse for applicants from the six Persian Gulf countries where U.S. embassies and consulates have suspended routine visa services because of the war in Iran. In the last three months, the citizens of those countries have needed to fly four hours each way to Cairo — or farther away — for interviews. Even that, however, is now practically impossible because of the website problems.
Qatari nationals can visit the United States for tourism or business for up to 90 days without a visa, but that waiver doesn’t apply to student, work and other types of visas. Travelers from the other Gulf countries — Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — must obtain visas regardless of the purpose of their trips.
I haven’t seen evidence that the website problems are deliberate, but if they are not, after weeks of malfunctioning, the only other explanation I can think of is incompetence. I know that the State Department has experienced IT specialists, though I know nothing about CGI Federal. I’m also aware that the sites are constant targets of numerous bots all over the world, but the department has been dealing with that reality for many years.
What is perhaps most surprising is the large number of foreign visitors still willing to tolerate the U.S. visa application process in spite of its high cost and the new barriers the Trump administration has erected in the last year. Nonetheless, there has been a significant drop in international arrivals in the United States as a result of the administration’s policies, and the trend is likely to continue downward. It may take time, but demand for U.S. visas is likely to decline in the medium term.
Let’s not forget that, in January, the administration suspended issuing nonimmigrant visas to nationals of 39 countries. It also banned the citizens of 75 countries from applying for immigrant visas indefinitely. Along with adversaries, such as Iran, Yemen and Cuba, the blacklist includes longtime U.S. partners in Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean — and even NATO allies.
The message that foreigners aren’t welcome was reinforced last week with the decision to end the longtime policy of allowing candidates for permanent residency who are already in the United States on visas to adjust their status without leaving the country. In addition to being unnecessarily cruel — which I suppose is the point — the new requirement that applicants return to their home-countries and wait for decisions there strikes me as poorly thought through in terms of implementation.
U.S. embassies and consulates abroad aren’t sufficiently staffed to accept the potential deluge of immigrant visa applications. It’s true that the two January bans have freed up consular officers in the affected countries, but even if some officers were reassigned elsewhere — which is never as simple as it sounds — they wouldn’t come close to meeting the likely demand.
Perhaps the administration has a plan for a consular staffing surge it hasn’t announced, although it’s difficult to imagine where it would find more officers, after forcing many experienced ones out of the Foreign Service. Or perhaps it has no intention to process immigrant visa applications expeditiously and would be happy to blame the inevitable delays on insufficient staffing.
Every sovereign country has the right to determine who enters its territory and under what conditions. But there is a major difference between enforcing immigration laws and creating chaos through administrative dysfunction. Increasingly, the current visa environment appears designed not merely to screen applicants but to discourage them altogether.
For millions of people around the world, the visa process shapes their perception of the United States far more directly than presidential speeches or public diplomacy campaigns. When that system becomes dysfunctional, the damage extends far beyond travel disruptions. It undermines the country’s credibility.
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Nicholas Kralev is the founder and executive director of the Washington International Diplomatic Academy, and a former Financial Times and Washington Times correspondent. His books include “Diplomatic Tradecraft,” “America’s Other Army” and “Diplomats in the Trenches.”