Indians Slam US Over Visa Delays After Finding Out Processing Time for Chinese Takes Just 2 Days

An Indian citizen wanting to apply for an American visitor visa will have to wait for 833 days before they are granted an appointment at a local US mission. For Indian students, the waiting time for a US visa appointment is 433 days.

Many Indians have been left fuming after it emerged that the waiting time for Chinese applicants to get an appointment for an American visa at the embassy in Beijing is just between one to two days for all categories — visitor, student, and non-immigrant visas.

In the case of Pakistan, the waiting time to get an appointment at the US embassy in Islamabad is just one day for a student/exchange visitor visa. The waiting time to have an appointment for a visitor visa is 450 days.

The discrepancy in waiting times for getting a US visa appointment between Indians and Chinese and Pakistani applicants surfaced just a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar during bilateral talks in Washington that the visa delays weren’t unique to India’s case.

US visa delays

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Blinken suggested that American consulates around the world were experiencing long delays in granting visas, explaining that the demand “fell through the floor” during the COVID pandemic, thus affecting the overall system, which began functioning with much more “limited resources”.

“If it’s any consolation, I can tell you that this is a challenge that we’re facing around the world, and it’s a product, largely, of the COVID pandemic,” Blinken said at a joint press availability with Jaishankar on Wednesday, after a journalist questioned him on 800-day long delays in the case of Indian applicants.

Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar described the issue of visa delays as a “genuinely serious problem of some magnitude,” adding that it was largely up to the Biden administration to figure out the issue of visa delays.

“In India, I mean, there are families who are not able to meet their relatives there and people who can’t keep their business appointments. There are students who are waiting for a long time,” the Indian FM said while addressing a press conference at the Indian embassy in Washington on Wednesday.

According to US government estimates, there are around four million Indian-Americans in the US, with the community also constituting the second-biggest foreign-born immigrant group behind Mexicans.