What Visa Officers know at the time of the interview (and the 3 things they check for!)

I'm a former visa officer and today we're going to answer the age-old question of what exactly do visa officers know about your case at the time of the visa interview and what are the top three things that visa officers review when they're trying to make a decision on whether or not to approve or deny your visa. As to the first question, visa officers generally don't know very much about your case until right before the visa interview. Generally, it's in that 30 seconds as you're walking up to the visa window when they are pulling up your DS-160 visa application and they're reviewing it from top to bottom and looking at the most important questions to them. And this includes generally, how long are you going to the United States for? What type of visa are you applying for? Do you have family already in the U.S.? Have you been denied a visa before? And what do you think is the reason why you were denied? What is your job and how much do you make a month? What is your family situation? Are you married and do you have kids? And they're taking in all of that information to decide whether or not your situation makes sense. And if that sounds like it's a lot of information to review in a very short time, you're absolutely right. However, visa officers, because their work is so repetitive and they interview so many people a day. For example, when I worked at the U.S. Embassy in China, I used to interview between 100 and 150 people a day. That is a lot of people to talk to, but what visa officers get really good at is scanning information really quickly and picking out what are the most important factors in making that important decision to decide whether or not you get to travel to the United States. Now to the second part of my video, what are the top three things that visa officers always look at when they're trying to make this decision? Okay. So the first thing that they look for is whether or not you've been denied a visa before. This is really important because whether or not you've been denied and if your situation has changed since your last interview will play a very important role in whether or not you overcome the situation this time and whether or not you can get your visa approved. If you have been denied more than once, all of those notes will be in the computer system and the visa officer will be able to pull them up and review why a different officer has decided that you don't qualify to go to the U.S. And this is why it's so important to make sure that you really try to minimize visa denials, that you go in prepared for your interview because if you're not prepared, sometimes officers can deny your visa in as short as 30 seconds. So you really want to make sure that you are extra prepared. You know what questions might come up and you know exactly how to answer the questions and what exactly they're asking for. The second thing that officers always look for is something called your clearances because when you apply for a visa, it goes into all sorts of different databases to check on your prior criminal history and all of these things and sometimes those things will pop up and if they do, the visa officer will want to ask you questions about what happened, see what you have to say for yourself, whether or not you still qualify for a visa. So that is also something that's very important. And the last thing that visa officers look for is whether or not an immigrant visa has been filed on your behalf. What that basically means is whether or not you have permanent or immigrant intent to go to the United States. Now if you'll remember, if you're applying for a non-immigrant temporary visa like usually what's required is that you don't have immigrant intent, that you don't actually intend to go to the US and stay permanently. However, if they see in the system that someone has already filed for a green card for you, then that is really going to be a factor in whether or not you qualify for this non-immigrant visa that's supposed to be temporary. So if you are someone who has had a green card or immigrant visa petition pending for a really long time, you'll want to be prepared to address that issue at your visa interview and know how to talk about it. And it doesn't mean that you're automatically denied just because you have a pending immigrant visa. However, it will complicate things and that means that this interview will be crucial to determining whether or not you actually qualify and how you explain things to the visa officer, how you engage with them, how you communicate with them is super important. The reason why I started this immigration law firm and visa consultancy is because I used to see so many people who are not prepared for the visa interview to their detriment and they end up getting a visa denied and that will go into their visa history forever. And you don't want that to be you. You always want to make sure that you're extra prepared and you know exactly how to tackle this very short but very important interview questions or comments. Feel free to leave something below. If you have a topic that you want answered in a video, please mention it in the comments. I'm always scanning your comments and seeing if there are topics for future videos. So thanks for spending this time with me.