Validate This: How Consular Officers Use Visa Refusals As Punishment

As an observer up to the previous day’s submitting, refusal charges usually are inversely related to the monetary development of a country: the decrease the level of economic improvement, the better the refusal fee. Most African countries have higher refusal quotes than more developed international locations, together with China, Russia, and Kazakhstan. But this does not always maintain authentic. An instance of this is the refusal fee of the United States Embassy in Armenia.

Even as these days reducing its refusal charge, the refusal fee of the Embassy in Yerevan is still at fifty one%, a stage higher than such countries as Bangladesh, Cambodia, crucial African Republic, and Burkina Faso. in keeping with the Embassy, this is due to the effects of a “validation study,” an evaluation of what number of Armenians overstay their visas or do not go back to their home united states. 

The excessive degree of overstays, consistent with the Embassy, justifies the high refusal fee.

As a standard rule, embassies do no longer disclose overstay charges. They view this information as “internal”: critical for policy formulation and schooling. Of path, it is also political – a mirrored image on the political, financial, and social scenario within the domestic country. Ultimately, that facts might also function a supply of embarrassment to consular team of workers: after all, consular officials are purported to be “getting it right” when reviewing visa applications – screening out intending immigrants from legitimate brief site visitors. 

If forty% of a rustic’s US visa recipients do now not go back to their domestic us of a, that is lots of unsuitable judgment. Whilst no person is a thoughts reader and intentions can alternate after arriving in the US, consular officers are nevertheless trained to distinguish between the “wheat” and the “chaff”. A extensive overstay price may additionally lead officers to err at the facet of warning and refuse applicants who have to receive visas.

Associated with this is the phenomenon of denying visas to family participants of folks who overstayed their visa or legally changed or adjusted their repute. as an instance, we're aware about situations in which officers denied visa programs of dad and mom seeking to go to their children and grandchildren inside the US because their child arrived in the US on a pupil or trade visa, married an American citizen, and adjusted their status to felony permanent resident, or the kid received asylum reputation. 

This, within the eyes of many officers is unacceptable, and so that they go to the “sin” of the child at the discern by using denying a visa to the man or woman they are able to, the figure.

Of direction, there may be conditions where the relative making use of for a visa does no longer meet the 214(b) burden, and the query can also become certainly one of credibility (“your brother didn’t come returned, and that i don’t suppose you'll either”). However too regularly 214(b) becomes the convenient pretext for being punitive rather than adjudicating an utility objectively. Punishment supplants dispassion. Nowhere within the foreign Affairs manual will you locate such a justification for denying a visa.