Three Minutes to Make or Break a Future

Guest post by Tyler Stokes, student at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law

Yesterday our group toured the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana, México. It was my first time in the country, and I enjoyed our visit with the consulars, but two things I learned during our excursion did not sit well with me.

First, I learned that as the State Dept. overall is “trying to go paperless,” it has stopped giving applicants visa approval slips, and instead has put up a couple laminated posters on the wall with what to do next. Our guide’s justification for this was that it’s a “waste of paper to give people approval slips that frankly most people don’t read or can’t read depending on the population.” I found this both condescending and offensive. In my opinion, for applicant peace of mind and proof of process (given how important paperwork is to the State Dept.), physical slips should still be provided.

Second, learning about the incredible level of discretion consular officers have under INA § 214(b) was quite disheartening. A consular officer completes on average twenty visa interviews an hour, which means each applicant gets a measly three minutes to overcome their interviewer’s statutorily mandated presumption that s/he will abuse a visa grant. While consular training may be fantastic, at the end of the day, the majority of these officers lack legal training and there is effectively no avenue for visa denial appeal. The resulting situation is that an individual visa interviewer holds way too much power over the future of visa applicants, and about three minutes is a difficult amount of time to advocate for yourself if you’re a trained attorney, let alone a layman. It seems to me this whole process could do with a big injection of a better brand of justice and external (judicial?) oversight.

-KitJ