Washington: A limited number of H-1B specialty occupation workers in the US will be allowed to renew their visas in January, according to State Department officials. The rollout of the H-1B domestic visa renewal pilot will only be limited to 20,000 participants initially. These applicants will just have to mail their visas to the State Department, and will not be allowed to travel outside the US.
“We really need to get proof of concept that it works before we can extend it to a larger group,” Deputy Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs Julie Stufft told reporters, according to Bloomberg Law. “This is a huge change for folks who live here and previously would have had to leave the United States.”
The selection process for the first 20,000 candidates has not been detailed yet. More details are expected to be published next month by the department.
The stateside visa renewal pilot program is one of multiple measures the State Department is looking to add or continue with the aim of driving down wait times for travel to the US, officials told reporters Monday.
US visas stamped or pasted on passport pages of applicants could soon be a thing of the past as the Biden administration has successfully completed a pilot project for issuing “paperless visa”, according to an official.
The United States recently completed the small-scale programme at its diplomatic mission in Dublin and it plans to gradually roll it out.
“We did our first small scope pilot of a paperless visa, which means that the visa process is the same but there’s no physical visa in someone’s passport. We just piloted this for the first time, so this is not something that’s going to be happening in the next year,” Julie Stufft, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Visa Services, told a group of foreign correspondents at a media round table organised by the Foreign Press Centre.
“It will take us probably 18 months to have widespread use of this or longer. But it is very exciting that we have had this first step where we have actually seen visitors come through and, in this case, they were immigrant visas without a physical paper in their passports.
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