Some relief: US mission in India releases over 1 lakh work-based H&L visa appointments

NEW DELHI: The US embassy in India has released over a lakh appointments for the employment-based H&L category of visas and their family members.
This was among the key assurances given by the US mission here recently after foreign minister S Jaishankar had raised the visa delay issue with US secretary of state Antony Blinken late last month.

Waiting time for first-time applicants for B1 (business) and B2 (visitor) first time applicants continue to remain high at 884 days in Delhi and 872 in Mumbai as on Friday — inching close to 2.5 years now!
“In response to high demand for employment-based visas, the US Mission to India recently released over 100,000 appointments for H&L workers and their families. Thousands of applicants have already booked their appointments and the wait time for both interview waiver and first-time appointments has been cut in half throughout Mission India. This bulk appointment opening reflects our ongoing commitment to H&L workers,” the US Embassy in India Tweeted on Friday, adding, “In fact, in the first nine months of 2022, the (we) had already processed over 160,000 H&L visas and we will continue to prioritise H&L workers for visa appointments as resources allow.”

L-1 and the H-1B visas are among the most popular non-immigrant work US visas. While L-1 is more appropriate for those working for MNCs, H-1B is more suitable for those planning to work for US companies and have more flexibility in their job.
The wait time for B1/B2 visas, however, continues to steadily climb. It is now close to 2.5 years in Delhi and Mumbai now. About this long wait period, US Embassy in Delhi’s minister counsellor for consular affairs Don Heflin had said last month: “We’re going to work on reducing that in the next few months as well (by opening) a lot of appointments soon. There’s still going to be wait times but we’re going to keep recovering and getting more and more personnel onto it. And we will head a point where we start to cut down the wait times.”

While visa applications have climbed back to pre-covid levels, foreign missions are yet to ramp up staffing to 2019 levels and be able to process the same. As a result, several countries including the US, UK, Canada and Schengen States face long wait times.
Heflin had said last month: “…we’re going to be at about 100% staffing a little bit before this time next year…. at that point (we’ll) be able to handle about 100% of the volume of (applications) we got before Covid. I (will) actually do a little better than that because we made some changes…. Washington is sending us out temporary (staff). We’re also going to get temporary (staff) from other big embassies. So, we should come to a point sometime between now and next summer where we’re able to handle somewhat more cases,” Heflin said.