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.
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?
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.
While true, the State Department already made the same change to immigrant visas a few days ago: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/a...
The crisis was not created by the immigration policies, but by the wars waged by US and Europe. You see, when you bomb people, some will stay there to die and some will live. It is _that_ simple.
An embassy will often have its own requirements based on the locality, whereas the visa requirements are uniform.
The Indian embassy in San Francisco might refuse to process non-resident applications but that doesn’t mean you can only get an Indian visa by going to an embassy in your country of nationality.
Like it seems hilariously backwards in your example that the cheaters were able to make an end run around the system you praise, when it would be easy to have someone local taking a look at global applications. Or just applications that someone thought were odd.
Nothing is "easy" when you have a line of hundreds of people who have been waiting months or over a year for their appointment and you have 120 seconds to deal with them in a fair and respectful way (which unfortunately does NOT always happen), while you also have personal job repercussions if you fail to properly vet their application and miss an important national security related detail.
As it turned out, we flagged enough of those cases as a patern for further review that did result in us consulting with our staff in the third country and discovering the issue. Also, visas that are issued can be revoked, or flagged for further scrutiny by CPB if necessary.
Did you response to the wrong comment or get a little mixed up about the shape of the comments tree or what?
The recourse to the constitution is silly. It has barely any relevance to the country we've become.
I’m American and every visa I’ve had to apply for did not require my physical presence at the embassy and I used a third-party processing service to get everything done.
Therefore, while I would need to apply to these countries from their US embassy because my physical presence was not required, I would generally not need to return to the United States to obtain their visa?
And this aspect of a US visa does make it significantly harder even though the application policy is similar to other countries?
That said, back in the 2000s I had to apply in person at the French embassy for a student visa, in in the 2010s I had to apply in person at a Chilean consulate for a special visa.
Many countries have outsourced the bulk of their processing to contractors like VFS or TLS these days. But also, our experience as Americans is not representative as we generally have fewer visas we need to bother obtaining, and face less scrutiny when doing so.
I'm not sure if the US interview requirement makes it "harder" to get a US visa - it may be that getting a US visa is just harder than getting another country's visa, which might still be true even if we didn't interview people. The big thing that makes getting non-immigrant visas to the US difficult for many people is that, unless shown otherwise, US immigration law assumes you are an immigrant.
I believe it is happens and I assume there might be a number of drivers for it, but I wonder how big of a problem is it in reality and how much has it been abused.
For example, friends told me the scheme in the UK might be too prone for fraud on the other hand most of the anti immigration topics do not seem to ask it to be fixed but rather stopped. What is your opinion on that? Do you think immigration is a big source of corruption problem? And how big is it relative to other problems?
My question comes from a point that I question if this is a populist/nationalist act to create a common enemy, literally the Enemy from 1984, rather than actually addressing the root cause of the problems. I am referring to the UK mostly because I have many friends living and working in the UK and some are British and some others are not.
And it seems weird to me that tackling such issues ( eg of the asylum seekers and the illegal immigration) as root causes of the current economic situation. Is it going after those folks really make a change on the prospects of the economy or is it addressing emotional needs to feel that someone is in control and that someone will take care of you because they fight the "enemy"?
For example, one of my British folks pointed out, and I did not validate myself, that the cost per asylum seeker is of £40 a week and there about 110.000 people in that situation which would make an expenditure of 4M per week or 200M per year. Which seems quite a large amount of money to deal with humanitarian assistance. And it would represent about 10% of the total expenditure. Another friend pointes out that UK collects £2.7B in taxes considering Health care, skilled and senior staff workers. The deficit in the public accountants are rather debatable so I do not have an opinion. What do you make from it?
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-08/25_0826_cbp_...
I can't address your other concerns about economic impact etc. I'm not sure if there is a negative economic impact from this.
as i said, that's a weird US rule. i do not believe that there are many countries in the world that have such a rule. i have never encountered something like that on my travels.
I don't know of any country that has consulates on its own land
not relevant because most countries simply don't need a consulate to renew visas.
>not relevant because most countries simply don't need a consulate to renew visas.
It's pretty relevant since what other institution is equipped to vet foreigners for visa eligibility?
that would be the foreign ministry office in the country.
in china i have my visa renewed once in a small countryside town. they were big enough to have an office there. every town has one. in germany too. the local government office has a branch of the foreign ministry.
i have never had to leave a country to renew my visa. that's just insane. in fact that's even true for the US, at least for non-immigrant visa: https://www.usa.gov/extend-visa
what the US makes different is that it separates the work permit from the visa, and they get different validity times. and while having a valid work permit is enough to stay in the country, a new visa is required to reenter. which other country does that? everywhere else the visa itself is required to stay, a work permit is not enough, and consequently, you also get to renew that visa in the country.
E.g. the NYC consulate: https://www.ny.us.emb-japan.go.jp/itpr_en/visa00.html
> You may apply for a visa at this Consulate if you are currently residing within the area covered by this Consulate.
Also, "a traveler without a fixed residence" can get a non-immigrant visa for Schengen? I'm sorry but this just is not true if you're not a Westerner.
If there is no doubt that you will leave and you can sustain yourself: sure.
there is no confusion, my argument is that this is only true for the US. according to my experience no other country does it that way because in most countries, visa and status are one and the same thing. no visa, no status. or, if there is a difference, then extending your status also extends your visa, or vice versa. and you do it in the country. not outside.
i also reject the claim that there is no one inside any country that could verify the status of a foreigner, only consulates outside the country could do that. that is straight out nonsense.
i also reject the claim that there is no one inside any country that could verify the status of a foreigner
That's good since I haven't made such a claim!
you made two claims:
a visa stamp can only be issued by a consulate
what other institution [besides a consulate] is equipped to vet foreigners for visa eligibility? (implying that there are none)
both of those are not true.
A question not being true is a novel concept to me. I was genuinely curious what country has an office equipped to interview and background check any foreigner in the world. But apparently it's not true, whatever that means.
sorry, renew and extend don't really mean anything different to me, because the end result is the same: you get to stay longer. i don't see why they should be different and why that should matter.