For a few weeks in India, we had a string of third-country nationals (I won't say which, but it's not hard to find) apply for foreign medical graduate visas. We weren't familiar with the context in country they were coming from. They seemed to be generally good quality applicants and many were approved. It turned out that there was a cheating scandal in that third country, an entire batch of test results had been invalidated, and the embassy located there was refusing their visas, so a few applied in India and were approved, then word got out and more came. We eventually wised up. However, there was really no good reason for these applicants to be travelling from their home country to India for a visa appointment even under normal circumstances (India isn't exactly known for having short visa wait times).
1) They think the system should be extremely simple 2) They assume everyone involved is being honest
When the reality is
1) Many people involved are lying to claim immigration benefits they have no right to 2) The system needs to have a level of complexity and difficulty to prevent these people from accessing these benefits
Having done tens of thousands of visa interviews, I do think the requirement of a physical appearance before an officer is important. I could quickly review a person's travel history by looking through their passports, questioning them about prior trips. A person's travel patterns and visas to other countries can tell you a lot. I could quickly use a UV light or magnifier on educational documents to see if they were genuine. Several times, I overhead conversations from other applicants and officers that were relevant to my applicant (same employer/group) and I would consult with them. There are many other details you notice when doing this in person thousands of times.
There are also practical matters - if you're trying to do this via video link, how to you authenticate the person on the other end? At the consulate, we fingerprint them and compare them to previously collected biometrics. If you offload this authentication to a contractor site in the US, but I'm in India, is this site open in the middle of the night?
In cases where the applicant qualifies for a waiver of the interview, the State Department actually does (or at least did when I was there) have a substantial program whereby visa applications are largely processed remotely. An applicant would have no hint as to whether or not that happened, though.
So oddly, the US was far more permissive than other locales in this one aspect. All this change does is bring it in line with security practices that other nations already had in place.
Honestly am quite surprised that the US didn’t already have this restriction considering overall it’s one of the toughest countries to get a visa for or even enter with a valid visa.
The US visa vetting procedure is known to be so strict even for tourists that many nations give visa free access to nationals who would otherwise require a visa - just because they hold a valid (or sometimes even expired!) US visa. It’s a highly regarded sticker if you can get one in your passport and seriously ups the power of your passport if it’s a weaker one to start with.
The US started of as a “zero to one” - a “sui-generis” state - unlike any other
Over time the people that gave in to the temptation to copy others, to be imperialistic, to be a colonizer, to be a slaver, to be expansionist all managed to damage the soul of the country- and still they keep trying
Why the insistence of being like almost every other country ?
> Most embassies required you to be resident or a national of the country you are applying in.
Were not like other countries
> So oddly, the US was far more permissive than other locales in this one aspect. All this change does is bring it in line with security practices that other nations already had in place.
We won two world wars and put a man on the moon - and you want to bring the US in line ?
The greatest experiment in state-building and you want to make it average?
Citation needed /s
(And in fact, in my experience, it is getting easier with online applications becoming more common.)
https://bkpk.me/peru-visa-for-indians/
The San Francisco consulate of India refused to process my spouse’s Indian visa because she was not resident in the US.
https://bkpk.me/how-we-finally-got-zaras-visa-to-india/
Several more examples but in this day and age you can just ask chat gpt to summarize for you. But if you check visa application requirements for many embassies, they will often say: proof of residence if not a national of the country of application. So that’s the requirement often.
I will add though that I’ve always maintained that this is a soft policy and they will make exceptions in some cases. It is mostly consulates wanting to do as little work as humanly possible. So there can be ways to get around it if you can talk to someone in charge. But usually that’s very difficult with consulates.
I’m pretty sure though in the US’ case now it’s a hard no. So there will be no working around it.
You can’t expect a person living in country X to validate the documents from Y country. It’s quite unreasonable to expect that they will even understand the language the document is in.
If the claim is the VISA issuing officer already doesn’t verify anything and therefore familiarity with the language and system of country Y isn’t necessary, that’s a different discussion.
The thing to fix here is requiring that someone already in US has to go to a consulate to renew/change their VISA. For someone who went to college in US for 4 years, and then did OPT for ~2 years, it’s meaningless for them to go to their home country to apply for an H1B, because all the documents they will bring will be from the US and the home country consulate personnel may not even be fit to check the validity of those documents.
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/schengen/visa-pol...
This seems to differ from the new US rule where you must also apply in the country you're a resident of.
The way it works is, if you're applying for a French visa in Mongolia and you're not a Mongolian national, you need to provide your Mongolian residence permit or else your application will be refused outright.
Sure, most other countries don't allow TCNs to apply for visa, but they also don't require their long term residents to leave the country to renew their visa.
So, the correct solution to this is Domestic Visa Renewal. A pilot program was run last year, but it was limited to Indian H1B holders. Without this program in place, disallowing TCNs is simply cruel.
I recommend you read the link, which in the first few words outlines “non-immigrants” and my summary.
> Adjudicating Nonimmigrant Visa Applicants in Their Country of Residence
Insane. This is going to destroy the tourism industry and collapse business travel.
Last time I went to Canada all I needed was a Passport. I do not even remember showing it to the Custom Official. I drove up said hi and they let me through.
As far as I know it was/is the same for Canadians visiting the US. Except the US border people tended to be d**ks, even to US Citizens.
Did that change?
