One year ago today. On the sunny Tuesday of April 17th 2018 I visited the US embassy in Stockholm Sweden and applied for a visa. I’m still waiting for them to respond.
My days-since-my-visa-application counter page is still counting. Technically speaking, I had already applied but that was the day of the actual physical in-person interview that served as the last formal step in the application process. Most people are then getting their visa application confirmed within weeks.
Initially I emailed them a few times after that interview since the process took so long (little did I know back then), but now I haven’t done it for many months. Their last response assured me that they are “working on it”.
Lots of things have happened in my life since last April. I quit my job at Mozilla and started a new job at wolfSSL, again working for a US based company. One that I cannot go visit.
During this year I missed out on a Mozilla all-hands, I’ve been invited to the US several times to talk at conferences that I had to decline and a friend is getting married there this summer and I can’t go. And more.
Going forward I will miss more interesting meetings and speaking opportunities and I have many friends whom I cannot visit. This is a mild blocker to things I would want to do and it is an obstacle to my profession and career.
I guess I might get my rejection notice before my counter reaches two full years, based on stories I’ve heard from other people in similar situations such as mine. I don’t know yet what I’ll do when it eventually happens. I don’t think there are any rules that prevent me from reapplying, other than the fact that I need to pay more money and I can’t think of any particular reason why they would change their minds just by me trying again. I will probably give it a rest a while first.
I’m lucky and fortunate that people and organizations have adopted to my situation – a situation I of course I share with many others so it’s not uniquely mine – so lots of meetings and events have been held outside of the US at least partially to accommodate me. I’m most grateful for this and I understand that at times it won’t work and I then can’t attend. These days most things are at least partly accessible via video streams etc, repairing the harm a little. (And yes, this is a first-world problem and I’m fortunate that I can still travel to most other parts of the world without much trouble.)
Finally: no, I still have no clue as to why they act like this and I don’t have any hope of ever finding out.
Trump reassigned personnel that would be processing naturalizations and green cards to witch hunts to find reasons to strip brown people of them. The resulting backlog has lengthened both procedures considerably.
Now tourist or business B1 visas are processed by the State Department consular officers, a different department than USCIS, but it has also endured savage cuts, because the Trump administration does not believe in diplomacy, so you have a huge backlog for these as well.
Finally there is also something fishy going on with security researchers. Ron Rivest, the R in RSA, was denied a visa and the former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal was harassed despite being a US citizen.
Yeah, I know, the hatred of all things Trump explains everything. It’s like the old Russian joke: “Tap has no water: Jews are at fault, they drunk it all. Tap has water: Jews are at fault, they peed in there.”
Hahaha thanks for pointing that out!