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The Diversity Lottery program was created to diversify our immigrant population and give individuals the opportunity to immigrate who otherwise would not be eligible. No one can argue that the program has not achieved these objectives over the years, with hundreds of thousands of individuals and their families from around the world receiving green cards. But it has also been ravaged by scandal, usually provoked by overzealous, biased, or incompetent consular staff. The latest: consular staff at the US Embassy in Kenya, after collecting fees from DV-2024 winners from Somalia in September and causing them to incur thousands of dollars in expenses to travel to Kenya for their visa interviews, automatically denied them.

Recently, a report was published chronicling the number of foreign citizens found to be inadmissible to the United States. While much attention is given to the US-Mexico border, more than half of the 1.2 million inadmissibility findings for fiscal year 2024 relate to other ports of entry. One of the report’s most stunning findings relates to the exponential growth in the number of individuals who have withdrawn their application for entry: from about 50,000 in 2019 to nearly 200,000 in 2024. While the term “withdraw an application” sounds benign, it can be traumatic - with long-term consequences.

According to the report, the most common ports of entry for these findings of inadmissibility are in Buffalo, Seattle, and Boston. Chicago O’Hare is another airport with a reputation for having a rigorous enforcement mentality. The most common home countries for individuals who have withdrawn their applications for entry include Canada, India, China, France, and Mexico.

Below are the visa refusal statistics for the 2019-2023 period. These are the statistics for B Visitor Visas, not for other categories.

While some country’s visa refusal statistics have remained relatively steady, some have trended positively and others are headed in the wrong direction. For example, the refusal rate for Indians has dropped substantially since 2019 – from nearly 28% in 2019 to about 11% in 2023. However, for those who see the glass as “half empty,” they would point to the large increase from 2022 to 2023: from 6.54% to 10.99%.

The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) created a special category of visas for professionals from Canada and Mexico to work in the United States. The role of the consular officer is to ensure that the applying professional has the qualifications for the offered job and that the job is bona fide, as well as to facilitate the prompt entry into the United States of these professionals. But apparently some consular officers in Mexico are infused with a «culture of no» mentality, denying and victimizing many well-qualified Mexican applicants. To be clear, there has been some fraud in Mexico in TN applications. This is not about those cases, in which the consul is justified in imposing a bar under Section 212(a)(6)©(i). The consuls in Mexico are under daunting time pressures: they issue nearly 50,000 TN and TD (for dependents) visas a year, with only a few minutes to make a decision at the…

Consular zealotry knows no bounds. That is the impression that I am getting after conducting a flurry of consultations on visa denials related to EB-3 cases. After an EB-3 immigrant visa is denied at the Embassy, the I-140 approved petition is referred back to USCIS for review, often with an accusation against the applicant about a supposed willful, material misrepresentation. Compounding the problem, sometimes the petitioner-employer in the US decides not to continue the process or the applicant changes his or her mind and decides to pursue other immigration options (e.g., if has a US citizen adult child). But like that evil jack-in-the-box or Jason in Friday the 13th, the “bad guy” — the misrepresentation allegation in the form of a Section 212(a)(6)(C)(i) finding — pops up out of nowhere when you least expect it, years later when applying for a new, different visa. This then complicates the ability to…