State Department Vows to Speed Up Visas for Scholars

Washington — The U.S. State Department is moving to speed up the delay-ridden visa-application process for foreign students and scholars.

Seeking to deal with a backlog of visa requests, the department has brought in additional staff members, including both permanent and temporary workers, to handle applications and has revamped policies to accelerate reviews, said David Donahue, deputy assistant secretary of state for consular services.

Mr. Donahue said the delays had stemmed from increasing numbers of visa applications and from staff shortages. The efforts to improve the process were first reported this morning by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Academic groups and scientific organizations have complained that researchers from abroad who are seeking to obtain or renew visas have frequently encountered months-long delays. As a result, some scholars who left the United States have been stranded, the groups say, while other researchers and students have been discouraged from traveling to the United States for work or for academic meetings.

Vaughan Turekian, chief international officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said his nonprofit group saw particular problems when scientists from China and countries in the former Soviet Union tried to obtain visas. For example, about 20 percent of the high-level Chinese experts invited to participate in a recent workshop on ethics and conduct between the United States and China had to drop out because visa processing took too long.

“We didn’t have any predictability,” Mr. Turekian said.

Tougher visa rules established after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were meant to weed out students or scholars who could be threats to national security, but many higher-education officials have expressed concern that the more-restrictive regulations had deterred academics from coming to the United States. A survey of students and scholars at the University of California at Los Angeles, for example, found that 38 percent of respondents with F-1 student visas and 56 percent of those with H1-B work visas said visa delays had forced them to alter their travel plans.

Mr. Donahue said he could not comment specifically on the procedural changes. But he said the department hoped to reduce the turnaround time for visa applications to two weeks. —Karin Fischer