When Pallavi Rao found out her father had a medical emergency and was in the intensive care unit, her first thought was to go to him immediately — but she couldn’t. Her father is in India, and she lives in America on a visa, which needs a renewal. If she left for India, she would not be allowed back in the U.S.
Rao, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, is one of thousands of Indians on a work visa in the U.S. unable to return to their home country because of a backlog at the embassy, causing them to miss milestones, family events and even funerals. The U.S. Embassy in India’s capital, New Delhi, currently has a wait time of 833 days to get an appointment for a visitor visa — that’s over two years — according to the State Department's website. The wait time for student visas is 430 days, and the wait for nonimmigrant visas is 390 days.
According to the website, other cities have much faster wait times for visitor visas: just two days for Hong Kong and Beijing and 11 days for Tokyo. A State Department spokesperson told TODAY the delay in India specifically is due to a combination of high demand in the country and a staffing shortage caused by the pandemic.
For Rao, the embassy troubles mean she has not been home in 3 1/2 years. Although all she needs is a renewed stamp on her visa, which only requires dropping off her documents with no interview, the caveat is that the documents must be dropped off in your home country. Renewals require returning to the home country, securing an appointment to drop off documents at the embassy and waiting for them to be returned.
Thinking the process would be quick, she started looking for appointments in January. It would be six months before she managed, after logging on every day, to secure an appointment — for October 2023.
“It feels like a gilded cage,” Rao told TODAY by phone. “With my father being admitted to the ICU, it feels like I’m being asked to choose between having a nice job … and wanting to travel. It’s absurd.”
Rao said she's part of the approximately 200,000 Indians in a Telegram group who post every day regarding available appointments. Although she was able to secure an appointment for next year, she said it's not ideal because she has to teach during the academic year, so she's trying to reschedule her appointment, especially because of her father's condition.
"If the worst happens and I have to leave home ... I need to tell work about this, and if I don't ever come back, do I have someone who can sell my furniture? I'm thinking worst-case scenario what could happen, and it shouldn't have to be like that," Rao said. "You think that these are the functioning arms and legs of the bureaucracy in the United States, but it's just been appalling that there's been no communication, really."
'Golden handcuffs'
For many Indians, the conflict of having a job in the U.S. but being stuck in limbo between the two countries is confining, Debarghya Das said. Das, who was born in India but used to live in America on a green card, aggregated stories of Indian families struggling with embassy wait times in a viral Twitter thread that has amassed more than 5,000 likes over the past two weeks.
Because he gave up his green card when he moved back to India, Das now is one of the thousands of Indians living in America on a work visa.
"I have friends and people that I don't know on Twitter who have had their parents pass away or their grandparents pass away, a cousin's wedding, all sorts of important family events, and they just can't travel back there," Das said. "They call it the golden handcuffs — you have a great job, you live in America, but you can't really do anything."
Das explained that the embassy website only allows a maximum of three logins per day, so some members of the Telegram group created Chrome extensions and bots to monitor the appointment slots in an attempt to optimize the chances of securing one. He said this practice has just become "a way of life."
Das said he thinks the embassy wait times are due to a snowballing backlog of cases waiting for documentation. He said he knows people who have been in the country for 15 years and only recently got their green cards approved.
The State Department spokesperson said the department has currently doubled consular hires as compared to last year and is actively working on onboarding new hires to address the staffing shortage.
Although he waited for months, Das was able to secure an appointment for this past month to renew his visa, returning to his country of birth just to drop off his documents.
"The website is absolutely atrocious and hard to use. Even when you try to book stuff, it'll time out and lock you out unexpectedly," Das said. "It's just so frustrating ... a lot more people in the last two years, in my knowledge, have been looking at other countries seriously as options than ever before."
The State Department spokesperson did not address complaints about the website.
Stuck in between
Sohini Chattopadhyay, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, returned to India in 2021 to renew her visa, thinking it would be a quick process. Instead, she remained there for nine months until she finally secured an appointment, even though she just needed to drop off her documents without an interview.
While her trip to India also allowed her to complete some research for her Ph.D., she said she was not expecting the wait to take that long. But then the consulates shut down right around the time she was returning to India to get a renewal.
"I lost my dad in 2019, and my mom doesn't have a U.S. tourist visa ... and my sister is in the U.S. and is supposed to come to India to get a renewal for her (visa) but there's no slot available," Chattopadhyay said. "So basically my mom can't go to the U.S., my sister can't come back, and I'm the only one who has a visa."
Chattopadhyay said her mom began looking for tourist visa appointments last year and still has not been able to get one.
The State Department website notes that there is a process for expediting appointments, but you must already have a confirmed appointment date and apply for a slot, which are "very limited," according to its website. Although there are companies that specialize in expediting passports and visas, TODAY confirmed with a consultant at CIBT, a global provider of immigration and visa services, that they are unable to expedite U.S. visas in India at this time due to the backlog.
Chattopadhyay, meanwhile, said her whole visa renewal experience has shown her what it's like to be in a country where she feels the burden of not being a citizen, which has made her "rethink significantly" where she wants to live.
"Ultimately, it's a systemic failure on their end — the U.S. immigration system and how it functions and the entire visa system needs to be better so that this crisis doesn't exist," she said. "We also know that countries like India, and many other countries, do provide a lot of intellectual labor to the U.S., and this is probably not the best way to handle that."
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the government agency that oversees lawful immigration, did not respond to a request for comment.
Missing out on life
For many Indians, the long embassy wait times means missing life events, both the good and the bad. For Anika, who asked that her real name be withheld to not hurt her chances of getting her visa renewal, waiting for months to secure an appointment meant missing her grandfather's funeral.
"I was really close to my granddad and he passed away, and this year was his one-year (death anniversary ritual) and I at least wanted to make it to that, but I wasn't able to find any appointments," Anika said.
She also graduated from college during the pandemic and moved between cities for different jobs, which were milestones her family missed out on.
After months of frustration without "a quiver of hope," she was finally able to secure an appointment last week for November, after Minister Counselor for Consular Affairs Don Heflin from the U.S. Embassy in India announced on Facebook Live that it would be opening up 100,000 appointment slots.
If she had the chance to speak to the U.S. Embassy, Anika said she would ask them to make provisions to ease the visa process, especially for renewals, so people in special circumstances could get home quickly and not have to worry about their return to the U.S. (The U.S. Embassy in India referred any requests for comment to the State Department.)
Although she is remaining cautiously optimistic now that she has secured an appointment, Anika said the process has taken a huge mental toll.
"We're in this country alone, and a lot of people's families are back home. It just gets mentally really, really hard to keep on going through and doing your work," she said. "And if your loved ones or anyone is in a state of distress, you want to be there for them, but if you're not able to, that really lingers on. It's really hard."
