Since last year, Indian workers on visas have been constantly checking the visa website for open slots.Īatira Vijay, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, is one of them. In Nepal, people can’t even get visa appointments unless it’s a medical or business emergency, or there’s a death in the family. Applicants in Istanbul have to wait nearly two years. In Canada, there is a year’s wait for appointments at some U.S. consulates in India also have similar problems. Appointment availability changes weekly and there’s no guarantee Paik can actually get one. embassy in New Delhi, the city closest to Paik’s hometown, Chandigarh. The State Department’s website shows a wait time of more than eight months to get an appointment at the U.S. consulates and embassies … closed and a backlog was created,” said Annelise Araujo, an immigration attorney and chair of the New England chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “When the pandemic happened, a lot of the U.S. ![]() Rajandeep Singh Paik lifts his nine-month-old son Siraj after getting home from work. These appointments are incredibly hard to get right now, with high demand and long wait times. To renew his visa, Paik needs to find an appointment for an in-person interview at a U.S. They can leave the United States but can’t re-enter. Paik, a rheumatologist in Malden, is among the thousands of working professionals - doctors, engineers, researchers and others - who are authorized to work and live in the U.S., but their work visas have expired so they are essentially stuck here. “We haven’t been able to meet any of our other family, any of our friends, you know, our pets back home, the streets of our hometown, the food we used to eat there,” he said. He hasn’t been home in more than two years. However, Paik, who lives in South Boston, cannot leave the United States because he wouldn’t be allowed to come back on his visa that expired during the pandemic. ![]() People are planning vacations and traveling internationally again. Rajandeep Singh Paik wants to celebrate his son’s first birthday in his hometown in India.
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