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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawUS Immigration LawWhat's Going On with Visa Interviews at the US Embassy in Bangkok?

What's Going On with Visa Interviews at the US Embassy in Bangkok?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing "what is going on with interviews at the US Embassy in Bangkok?" For those who are unaware, I have been getting a lot of correspondence on this. Now I know it pertains to a relatively narrow subset of at least our audience but even more so even with our clients. It is an issue that is really gets to the heart, it pulls the heart strings of many of our clients that are having to deal with this process. I totally get your frustration, I understand what you are going through here and it is, well it is frustrating. It is difficult to be dealing with these delays. 

Long story short, I am not trying to be an apologist for the US Embassy, although I get accused of that a lot. The Embassy in my opinion is doing the best that they can. They have had to postpone a number of cases. We have dealt with a number of clients that have had their cases postponed; we have seen interview appointments canceled and moved back in terms of timing so further down the line in terms of timing; also there are backlogs. I am doing a video contemporaneously with this one where we discuss that in a little more detail but yeah there are backlogs and things just aren’t moving as fast as they normally do. We cleared a lot of things back in February especially. After Biden got into office it seemed like a switch was flipped, especially the cases that had already gotten out of NVC or had been sitting at NVC for a long time, got over here. That said, for those who have yet to get an interview, it is probably going to be a little bit more time than what you are going to read about on the internet as standard operating procedure. They are citing the fact that at least at the Embassy here, they have to take precautions with respect to COVID-19, they may have less people in the office. All kinds of things are contributing to it. They also I think have some concerns about having a lot of people gathered in one place and for those that have actually seen the Immigrant Visa interview days, there are a lot of folks there, especially Non-Immigrant Visa interview days. The Student Visa days, it is lined up wall to wall sometimes. So they have to take these precautions. 

Again I am not trying to speak for them at all. This is just one person's outside observation but I think we are in for a little bit of a long ride until the overall situation here calms down, we are probably going to see things postponed. Don't expect things to move overly quickly through the Embassy but they are trying and they are moving cases through. We have seen it ourselves; we have helped people get their cases processed out; we have helped people get into interview. It is just not moving as fast as it normally does. I am hopeful at least, I am thinking sometime in the third quarter of the year probably things will start getting back to some modicum or semblance of, I hesitate to use the word normal, because what does that mean these days, but back to something akin to what it was like in 2019 for example. But again, we have got a major backlog, we have got a lot of things to consider. It is a fluid situation. I understand folks' frustration. I think everybody is moving as fast as they can.