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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawUS Immigration LawDHS Requiring Interviews in More US Visa Cases

DHS Requiring Interviews in More US Visa Cases

Transcript of the above video:

In this video today, we're going to be discussing some recent announcements with respect to changes in Department of Homeland Security policy with respect to visa applications, visa renewals associated with certain employment based categories. To quote from a recent article that was published on nbcnews.com, the article was published August 25th, 2017 6 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The authors are Sara Fitzpatrick and Julia Ainsley. The title of the article is “DHS to Require Interviews for More Than a Hundred Thousand Visa Holders.”

To quote directly by- line Washington, “The Department of Homeland Security will begin requiring holders of employment-based visas to be interviewed in order to update their status” according to officials at the agency and a spokesman. Critics say the move could jam the already backlogged visa application system.” An internal agency memo seen by NBC News estimated that more than 130,000 applicants annually would now be required to be interviewed before changing their status from one visa category such as technical worker to another category, such as agriculture worker”, Carter Langston a spokesman for US Citizenship and Immigration Services which is part of DHS confirmed the memo.

Okay, so what are we talking about here and how does this really affect things over here in the Kingdom of Thailand? Well first off, those Thai nationals who are or those from any Southeast Asian country or any country for that matter around the world who are in the United States on an employment-based visa and are thinking of or seeking change of status or adjustment of status into another category, are probably, or can probably pretty well assume that there's now going to be an interview requirement regardless of previous protocols. Another thing to keep in mind is basically I wanted to bring this up in a video on this channel just to basically articulate or elucidate the fact that just across the board, immigration matters are becoming more and more difficult; frankly, they're becoming more time-consuming. New requirements are being added on at a frequent pace and this is just one more example of a larger theme in the world of U.S. immigration that you know, no matter what kind of visa category you're looking at, things are tightening up.

As noted in another video, the non-immigrant visa units outside the United States have essentially been ordered by the Executive branch of the government to sort of deprioritize Non Immigrant visa processing. Various aspects of the immigrant visa process or adjudication of immigrant visas has been tightened up in you know in association with the so called extreme “vetting” protocols and finally the proposed “Raise Act” by the Trump administration is very likely if passed to pretty radically and fundamentally alter many of the definitions of various family based immigrants as well as based various immigrants in general.

So I bring up this article, I made this video just to again highlight the fact that immigration matters are becoming more and more scrutinized. The thresholds and the bars for dealing with these things are getting higher, they're getting harder to overcome and more and more requirements are being added on by the day and I think it's fairly safe to assume that this trend is going to continue in this direction probably throughout the continuation of this Presidential Administration.