Anything to make it more difficult.
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/schengen/visa-pol...
I recommend you read the link, which in the first few words outlines “non-immigrants” and my summary.
> Adjudicating Nonimmigrant Visa Applicants in Their Country of Residence
Insane. This is going to destroy the tourism industry and collapse business travel.
So oddly, the US was far more permissive than other locales in this one aspect. All this change does is bring it in line with security practices that other nations already had in place.
Honestly am quite surprised that the US didn’t already have this restriction considering overall it’s one of the toughest countries to get a visa for or even enter with a valid visa.
The US visa vetting procedure is known to be so strict even for tourists that many nations give visa free access to nationals who would otherwise require a visa - just because they hold a valid (or sometimes even expired!) US visa. It’s a highly regarded sticker if you can get one in your passport and seriously ups the power of your passport if it’s a weaker one to start with.
It removes a convenience that was sometimes abused (see the top post) and makes it harder to bypass US law to get a visa.
This seems to differ from the new US rule where you must also apply in the country you're a resident of.
I can't say I have any loyalty to the government or the constitution, but i will say that our willingness to accept immigrants is far and away the best thing about this place.
Last time I went to Canada all I needed was a Passport. I do not even remember showing it to the Custom Official. I drove up said hi and they let me through.
As far as I know it was/is the same for Canadians visiting the US. Except the US border people tended to be d**ks, even to US Citizens.
Did that change?
I guess I would have preferred some kind of qualifier at the beginning saying it’s not written by a human
(And in fact, in my experience, it is getting easier with online applications becoming more common.)
Is this just going to derail world travelers who want to add a last minute US leg to their itinerary? That would seem entirely pointless.
Honestly I'm pretty confused.
Unchecked immigration has wrecked countries, it’s a big problem in Canada for instance. We have definitely passed the era in the world where immigration was automatically a good thing. The game has changed.
Let’s give this a computer analogy. Suppose I run a multi-datacenter service, and I have an endpoint in Europe and an endpoint in Asia. I accept requests for any account at any endpoint, and I discover that I have faster response latency and fewer 500 errors at the European endpoint than the Asia endpoint. Some of my Asian users have started using the European endpoint. Do I:
(a) Decide that this is just fine — the users are load balancing for me?
(b) Fix my system so that I treat requests fairly regardless of which endpoint they hit and maybe add front ends so that the front end isn’t a bottleneck?
(c) Start unconditionally rejecting requests if the account isn’t in the endpoint’s region? Or maybe even require the account and the originating IP to be in the endpoint’s region.
—-
(a) is a bit lazy but could work fine in the context of the Internet if I can encourage clients to load balance in an intelligent manner. It’s pretty obnoxious if the clients need to get on an actual airplane (and make visa-related API calls to do so!) to switch endpoints.
(b) seems ideal. If my system is weak I should fix it.
(c) seems unbelievably inappropriate to me.
Now let’s consider real life. There’s some actual human being, not a phone app. They’ve just finished a PhD in the US, and they have actual friends. They want to get a job in the US where they will benefit the US economy. And their desire is even compatible with US immigration rules. Except that they’re from Asia. Should the US:
1. Let them apply from within the US and let them stay here while applying (which should be fast — why is there a queue anyway? Either they should be accepted or rejected, but we benefit no one by making it slow). Then they are still around their US friends and they’re more likely to stay.
2. Require them to go visit Canada or something similar to apply? Seems pretty silly, but at least they’ll likely either end up benefitting the US or Canadian economy.
3. Require them to go back to Asia, where they have no apartment and will possibly need a job before their visa application can finish processing, and let the rather growth-oriented Chinese system try to give them an offer that gets them to stay, fairly happily, in China?
Even putting aside that choosing (c) and (3) is kind of inhumane to make someone leave all home for a few months if they are indeed eligible for a visa to stay, this seems UTTERLY STUPID as a matter of US policy. Why on Earth do we think it’s reasonable for the embassy’s local waiting time and acceptance rate to be a relevant part of our policy for who ends up getting a visa?
And yes, I know people who came to the US, got PhDs (and even brought the money to pay for them here with them), and then started companies abroad because of US visa rules.
https://bkpk.me/peru-visa-for-indians/
The San Francisco consulate of India refused to process my spouse’s Indian visa because she was not resident in the US.
https://bkpk.me/how-we-finally-got-zaras-visa-to-india/
Several more examples but in this day and age you can just ask chat gpt to summarize for you. But if you check visa application requirements for many embassies, they will often say: proof of residence if not a national of the country of application. So that’s the requirement often.
I will add though that I’ve always maintained that this is a soft policy and they will make exceptions in some cases. It is mostly consulates wanting to do as little work as humanly possible. So there can be ways to get around it if you can talk to someone in charge. But usually that’s very difficult with consulates.
I’m pretty sure though in the US’ case now it’s a hard no. So there will be no working around it.
The way it works is, if you're applying for a French visa in Mongolia and you're not a Mongolian national, you need to provide your Mongolian residence permit or else your application will be refused outright.
If visa shoppers are overwhelming the normal processing of applicants who actually live in a particular country, it seems entirely appropriate to say "no, sorry, this location isn't for you" to the people who don't live there.
> how hard is it going to be for a motivated applicant to establish "proof of residence" in an arbitrary country
By residence they mean your legal status is a permanent resident, this is proven with a formal ID like green cards.
An embassy will often have its own requirements based on the locality, whereas the visa requirements are uniform.
The Indian embassy in San Francisco might refuse to process non-resident applications but that doesn’t mean you can only get an Indian visa by going to an embassy in your country of nationality.
For a few weeks in India, we had a string of third-country nationals (I won't say which, but it's not hard to find) apply for foreign medical graduate visas. We weren't familiar with the context in country they were coming from. They seemed to be generally good quality applicants and many were approved. It turned out that there was a cheating scandal in that third country, an entire batch of test results had been invalidated, and the embassy located there was refusing their visas, so a few applied in India and were approved, then word got out and more came. We eventually wised up. However, there was really no good reason for these applicants to be travelling from their home country to India for a visa appointment even under normal circumstances (India isn't exactly known for having short visa wait times).
While true, the State Department already made the same change to immigrant visas a few days ago: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/a...
The recourse to the constitution is silly. It has barely any relevance to the country we've become.
Another reason is, what happens if you apply for a renewal or different visa type while you're in the US, and your visa is denied? Now we're relying on you to leave the country, whereas if you already had to leave the country to apply and you're denied, you're not still in the US.
There actually was a pilot program for domestic revalidation of H-1Bs. Applicants liked it (no need for a trip outside the US), and those of us working in India liked it (less workload for us). However I doubt this administration will support expansion.
In my experience most renewing H-1Bs planned their visa interviews (or often "dropbox" cases where they didn't even need to come in person) to coincide during a few weeks trip home. They were not generally coming to India, then applying and waiting several months.
The cases that take months are those with some problem - missing some documentation, evidence of petitioner fraud, national security concerns with the applicant, etc. And yes, in those cases people (and sometimes their families) end up getting "stuck" outside the US, kids miss the start of the school year, people can't get back to their apartments and houses and pets. It sucks, but we have vetting for good reasons.
This is an opinion. Is it yours, or the AI's? Moreover, is the AI just trying to be agreeable or is this coming from a platform that has a political agenda, in this case supporting the political actors that are in charge of this visa change? These are the questions that we need to ask ourselves in these modern times.
Having done tens of thousands of visa interviews, I do think the requirement of a physical appearance before an officer is important. I could quickly review a person's travel history by looking through their passports, questioning them about prior trips. A person's travel patterns and visas to other countries can tell you a lot. I could quickly use a UV light or magnifier on educational documents to see if they were genuine. Several times, I overhead conversations from other applicants and officers that were relevant to my applicant (same employer/group) and I would consult with them. There are many other details you notice when doing this in person thousands of times.
There are also practical matters - if you're trying to do this via video link, how to you authenticate the person on the other end? At the consulate, we fingerprint them and compare them to previously collected biometrics. If you offload this authentication to a contractor site in the US, but I'm in India, is this site open in the middle of the night?
In cases where the applicant qualifies for a waiver of the interview, the State Department actually does (or at least did when I was there) have a substantial program whereby visa applications are largely processed remotely. An applicant would have no hint as to whether or not that happened, though.
Like it seems hilariously backwards in your example that the cheaters were able to make an end run around the system you praise, when it would be easy to have someone local taking a look at global applications. Or just applications that someone thought were odd.
1) They think the system should be extremely simple 2) They assume everyone involved is being honest
When the reality is
1) Many people involved are lying to claim immigration benefits they have no right to 2) The system needs to have a level of complexity and difficulty to prevent these people from accessing these benefits
E.g. the NYC consulate: https://www.ny.us.emb-japan.go.jp/itpr_en/visa00.html
> You may apply for a visa at this Consulate if you are currently residing within the area covered by this Consulate.
The whole worldwide visa system feels like a relic of the time before networks. Many tasks rely on physically moving pieces of paper around, leaving your passport with agents of a foreign government (!), and having documents that are stamped and supposedly authenticated. Shouldn’t everyone be able to separate the tasks of authenticating a person and authorizing that person to be somewhere?
Sure, most other countries don't allow TCNs to apply for visa, but they also don't require their long term residents to leave the country to renew their visa.
So, the correct solution to this is Domestic Visa Renewal. A pilot program was run last year, but it was limited to Indian H1B holders. Without this program in place, disallowing TCNs is simply cruel.
Did you response to the wrong comment or get a little mixed up about the shape of the comments tree or what?
I believe it is happens and I assume there might be a number of drivers for it, but I wonder how big of a problem is it in reality and how much has it been abused.
For example, friends told me the scheme in the UK might be too prone for fraud on the other hand most of the anti immigration topics do not seem to ask it to be fixed but rather stopped. What is your opinion on that? Do you think immigration is a big source of corruption problem? And how big is it relative to other problems?
My question comes from a point that I question if this is a populist/nationalist act to create a common enemy, literally the Enemy from 1984, rather than actually addressing the root cause of the problems. I am referring to the UK mostly because I have many friends living and working in the UK and some are British and some others are not.
And it seems weird to me that tackling such issues ( eg of the asylum seekers and the illegal immigration) as root causes of the current economic situation. Is it going after those folks really make a change on the prospects of the economy or is it addressing emotional needs to feel that someone is in control and that someone will take care of you because they fight the "enemy"?
For example, one of my British folks pointed out, and I did not validate myself, that the cost per asylum seeker is of £40 a week and there about 110.000 people in that situation which would make an expenditure of 4M per week or 200M per year. Which seems quite a large amount of money to deal with humanitarian assistance. And it would represent about 10% of the total expenditure. Another friend pointes out that UK collects £2.7B in taxes considering Health care, skilled and senior staff workers. The deficit in the public accountants are rather debatable so I do not have an opinion. What do you make from it?
Also, "a traveler without a fixed residence" can get a non-immigrant visa for Schengen? I'm sorry but this just is not true if you're not a Westerner.
If there is no doubt that you will leave and you can sustain yourself: sure.
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-08/25_0826_cbp_...
I can't address your other concerns about economic impact etc. I'm not sure if there is a negative economic impact from this.
as i said, that's a weird US rule. i do not believe that there are many countries in the world that have such a rule. i have never encountered something like that on my travels.
I don't know of any country that has consulates on its own land
not relevant because most countries simply don't need a consulate to renew visas.
I’m American and every visa I’ve had to apply for did not require my physical presence at the embassy and I used a third-party processing service to get everything done.
Therefore, while I would need to apply to these countries from their US embassy because my physical presence was not required, I would generally not need to return to the United States to obtain their visa?
And this aspect of a US visa does make it significantly harder even though the application policy is similar to other countries?
The US started of as a “zero to one” - a “sui-generis” state - unlike any other
Over time the people that gave in to the temptation to copy others, to be imperialistic, to be a colonizer, to be a slaver, to be expansionist all managed to damage the soul of the country- and still they keep trying
Why the insistence of being like almost every other country ?
> Most embassies required you to be resident or a national of the country you are applying in.
Were not like other countries
> So oddly, the US was far more permissive than other locales in this one aspect. All this change does is bring it in line with security practices that other nations already had in place.
We won two world wars and put a man on the moon - and you want to bring the US in line ?
The greatest experiment in state-building and you want to make it average?
>not relevant because most countries simply don't need a consulate to renew visas.
It's pretty relevant since what other institution is equipped to vet foreigners for visa eligibility?
The crisis was not created by the immigration policies, but by the wars waged by US and Europe. You see, when you bomb people, some will stay there to die and some will live. It is _that_ simple.
You can’t expect a person living in country X to validate the documents from Y country. It’s quite unreasonable to expect that they will even understand the language the document is in.
If the claim is the VISA issuing officer already doesn’t verify anything and therefore familiarity with the language and system of country Y isn’t necessary, that’s a different discussion.
The thing to fix here is requiring that someone already in US has to go to a consulate to renew/change their VISA. For someone who went to college in US for 4 years, and then did OPT for ~2 years, it’s meaningless for them to go to their home country to apply for an H1B, because all the documents they will bring will be from the US and the home country consulate personnel may not even be fit to check the validity of those documents.
It's long been a norm on HN that summary/tl;dr comments are not welcome. We want people's comments to be in response to the full article, not the summary. Sometimes a summary will be an inaccurate representation of the article, and when users base their response on the summary (without reading the article), it poisons the comments thread.
You weren't to know as it's not explicitly stated in the guidelines, but it is one of the norms that the moderation team and community has converged on over many years.
that would be the foreign ministry office in the country.
in china i have my visa renewed once in a small countryside town. they were big enough to have an office there. every town has one. in germany too. the local government office has a branch of the foreign ministry.
i have never had to leave a country to renew my visa. that's just insane. in fact that's even true for the US, at least for non-immigrant visa: https://www.usa.gov/extend-visa
what the US makes different is that it separates the work permit from the visa, and they get different validity times. and while having a valid work permit is enough to stay in the country, a new visa is required to reenter. which other country does that? everywhere else the visa itself is required to stay, a work permit is not enough, and consequently, you also get to renew that visa in the country.
there is no confusion, my argument is that this is only true for the US. according to my experience no other country does it that way because in most countries, visa and status are one and the same thing. no visa, no status. or, if there is a difference, then extending your status also extends your visa, or vice versa. and you do it in the country. not outside.
i also reject the claim that there is no one inside any country that could verify the status of a foreigner, only consulates outside the country could do that. that is straight out nonsense.
i also reject the claim that there is no one inside any country that could verify the status of a foreigner
That's good since I haven't made such a claim!
you made two claims:
a visa stamp can only be issued by a consulate
what other institution [besides a consulate] is equipped to vet foreigners for visa eligibility? (implying that there are none)
both of those are not true.
A question not being true is a novel concept to me. I was genuinely curious what country has an office equipped to interview and background check any foreigner in the world. But apparently it's not true, whatever that means.