I’ve noticed that approvals have become much fewer recently. For Chinese applicants I saw a figure of 25 days on average for review — does anyone have any statistics for the processing times of administrative processing under 221(g) for others? I have the feeling that there’s a mass review underway and consulates simply can’t handle that volume. Who has gone through it — what were the actual timelines?
From the figures I’ve seen: of roughly 10 million visas applied for per year, about one million end up under 221(g). Of those, the consular officer requests analysis from Washington in roughly 150,000 cases, and of those about 40,000 are processed for longer than four months. It doesn’t seem to depend on the visa type — more on the applicant’s profile and country of origin. As for resources with statistics — I’ve heard the Chinese have a separate site with accumulated data on waiting times, but I can’t find where that was right now.
Thanks, useful breakdown of the numbers. And those 40k that have been pending for more than 4 months — do they end up getting approved more often, or do they usually get rejected?
On checkee.info, if you pull statistics over several years, there are consistently 20–30% of cases listed as pending. Not approved, not denied, just hanging. These aren’t empty technical-error cases — they’re real people stuck in limbo who never received either a yes or a no. It’s also interesting how this relates to section 203(e) of the INA — it says that if a 221(g) has been pending for more than a year, the application is formally terminated. Such cases don’t show up in approval/denial statistics — they’re a separate category.