Some Visa Categories Are More Vulnerable than Others

By David North January 2012

David North is a CIS fellow who has studied the interaction of immigration and U.S. labor markets for more than 30 years.

One of the ongoing problems with America’s immigration policy is that it is not a single, unified policy, but rather a conglomeration of various immigrant, nonimmigrant, and refugee policies, all operating quite separately. A related problem is that available statistics on these programs sometimes make it awkward to analyze the programs in question.

There are literally scores of nonimmigrant (temporary) visa categories and millions of applicants with large numbers of government officials deciding, on a case-by-case basis, who should be admitted and who should be refused. How does this part of the process work, and what does the government tell us about it?

The basic answers are, “unevenly” and “not much,” but the Center for Immigration Studies has devised an easy-to-understand index, or box score, which shows:

• issuing or denying tourist visas in non-visa-waiver countries, is, in this context, the major headache to the government;
• visas for students, short-term unskilled workers (H-2A and H-2B), and religious workers are much more troublesome to State Department officials than most other categories;
• and the least difficult grouping of them all, by a country mile, are visiting officials of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

While the State Department says “yes” to 3.8 tourist visa applications (outside the visa-waiver nations) for each such application it denies, it says “yes” a thunderous 191.6 times for every time it says “no” to someone claiming to be an NATO official or his or her family member. Other classes of visas fall between these 1/3.8 and 1/191.6 extremes.

The box score shows at a glance, which visa programs are causing the most difficulty for the State Department officials who actually interview aliens wanting to enter the nation as nonimmigrants.

Based on published Department of State (DoS) data, currently organized in a less useful way,1 CIS has created a table arraying 16 of the more significant nonimmigrant programs in terms of their denial/approval ratios from the most to the least troublesome.

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End Notes

1 The CIS table is organized by the incidence of ineligibility in the various visa categories; the DOS data is arrayed alphabetically. Further, as explained in more detail below, the CIS table shows a single ratio, (e.g., one denial to 3.8 approvals), while the DOS data show four categories: issuances, refusals, total applicants, and “waived/overcome,” in that order. The data source for the CIS table is a tabulation in the annual report of the Visa Office headed “NIV Workload by Visa Category” with NIV standing for nonimmigrant visa. That two-page table can be seen at http://www.travel.state.gov/pdf/FY2010NIVWorkloadbyVisaCategory.pdf.

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