The visa officer told me no documents!… The visa officer didn’t even look at all the title deeds, bank statements, birth certificates, academic papers I had spent months preparing… All my documents were ignored! If you have ever been denied a visa at the US embassy, these complaints will sound very familiar.
You see, the refusal by visa officers at the US embassies to accept, peruse or examine documents from applicants during the visa interview is one of the major pain-points that many unsuccessful visa applicants at the US embassy lament over.
But according to ex-US visa officer and licensed US immigration attorney Mandy Zhang Feuerbacher who worked as a visa officer for seven years, there are very good reasons why visa officers will hardly agree to take the documents you carry with you to their window.
Mandy says that during her days as a visa officer at the US embassies, she hardly accepted to take or look at documents from visa interviewees who went to her window at the US consulate.
“Every applicant that I know will spend months putting together a pile of papers that they plan to bring to their US visa interview. It might include an invitation letter, bank statements, or asset information that you own in your country, or even information on your family ties,” says Mandy.
But more often than not, she goes on to say, the visa officer won’t even look at any of these documents.
“You will walk up to the window, the visa officer will look at you, you will try to pass this huge stack of documents that you have spent months carefully preparing and the officer will just tell you no documents. Sometimes they will say something like, ‘I don’t want to see any documents, I just want to hear from you!'” she says. “This is something that I often said to interviewees when I was a visa officer for seven years.”
But why is this the case? Mandy sought to clear the air. She explained that top on the list of reasons why your documents will not be looked at is because visa officers are always trying to go as fast as they can during the interview.
The visa officer has between 30 seconds and three minutes to make a decision on your case. “If they take the time to take your stack of documents and start rifling through them, it will take up a lot of time and it won’t tell them anything on whether you’re qualified to get the visa you’re asking for or not,” says Mandy.
“They don’t have the time. They’re being speedy. They want to interview you and everyone else behind you so that they can get to other things – could be go to lunch or even get home after work. They don’t have too much time on their hands.”
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She then points out that visa officers at US embassies have been made aware that in many countries around the world whose citizens require visas to enter the United States, documents including bank statements and invitation letters can be faked or forged.
“In their careers, visa officers have seen their fair share of fake documents to know that the cannot trust them, and so they don’t want to look a them,” says Mandy.
The Ex-US visa officer adds that the US embassies and consulates around the world have a policy against depending on documents presented by the visa interviewees to make decisions.
“This is actually a policy around consular sections in embassies and consulates around the world. Consular managers are constantly telling officers that documents can be faked, there is no time to look at them and verify, and that officers need to make decisions based on the interviews and not on documents,” she says.
“If an officer takes up your documents and starts looking at them really carefully, then one of their managers walks by at that moment and spots them looking at your documents, they can very easily get into a lot of trouble,” says Mandy. “Such a visa officer can even be summoned to explain why they are going against the ‘No documents’ policy.”
