The White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said that the US government is working to respond to the demand for visa appointments for India and aware of the long delays in visa appointments. Jean-Pierre was responding to a question on the very long visa appointment period at the US missions in India. The US visa wait time for Indians is more than 1,000 days.
The White House spokeswoman said that is something that we will continue to do. We have doubled our hiring of US Foreign Service personnel to do this important work, because we have successfully lowered visa interview wait times around the world. Visa processing is recovering faster than anticipated, and this year we expect to reach pre-pandemic levels. She acknowledged that staffing challenges and pandemic related closures have a significant impact on the speed of visa processing. The President's advisory commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, led by Indian American community leader Ajay Jain Bhaturia, made several recommendations to the Biden administration to reduce the ridiculously long visa wait times in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and other countries.
The Commission recommended that the State Department take necessary steps to ramp up visa processing and reduce wait times to 2 -- 4 weeks in countries with excruciatingly long wait times, such as India. It said that the State Department should allow virtual interviews where applicable, and staff from embassies worldwide should be allowed to conduct virtual interviews to reduce backlogs.
The issue of extremely long wait times for visas for Indians has been raised on Twitter time and again. Comedian Paul Graham wrote, Inefficiency of this magnitude makes America look incompetent. This is a banana republic-level performance because it is incompetent. Non-immigrant visa, visitor visa B 1 B 2 student visa F 1 F 2 and temporary worker visa H, L, O, P, Q appointments with U.S. embassies in countries like India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, other Asian nations and Pacific Islands have painfully long backlogs. The excruciatingly long wait time has resulted in hardship for Asian American Pacific Islander AAPI families inside the US and outside, and has resulted in major problems for students, businesses, and visitors.