embassy in New Delhi, said teams throughout India “are working at maximum possible safe staffing levels.”
“I cannot treat a patient with swollen joints or, you know, a patient with lupus, remotely via telemedicine.”Īriel Pollock, the spokesperson for the U.S. “I can’t afford to be stuck there for six weeks,” he said. He said even if he gets an appointment, he could be delayed in India, and his patients in Malden will suffer. That’s why Paik has not left the country. What happens if you go and your interview gets canceled last minute? What happens if you cannot get a visa in your passport to come back?' ” she said. “For any person who asks me, 'Should I travel overseas?' I think my conservative advice is, 'Don’t go. Araujo has been advising her clients on expired visas not to leave the United States. Immigration lawyers said delays are affecting work and student visas. If none are available, there’s no point in wasting their login quota for the day. More than 100,000 members on a visa group track appointment availability and alert each other if a slot opens up. Many others have found creative ways to find appointments via Telegram, a messaging app. She snagged an appointment for herself in New Delhi for June and is looking forward to going home. “As a daughter, I should be there for them,” she said.Ī few days after she spoke with WBUR, Vijay’s persistence paid off. “It's emotionally draining to think about your parents - what they are doing,” she said. When Vijay’s parents in India got COVID last month, her anxiety shot up. Vijay said it was “emotional hell” juggling pregnancy and searching for appointment times while working and recovering from COVID. Aatira Vijay in front of the entrance of the Simches Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. Applicants get locked out for up to 72 hours if they keep refreshing the page to see if new openings have popped up. While searching for appointment times, she said she was careful about the curveball the visa website threw at her. “Every single day when I come to the lab, the first thing that I check is I check for my appointment and then in the evening, I check for my parents’ appointment,” she said. Her visa expired last spring and she has been hunting for appointments to go home to India to get it renewed - or to bring her parents to Boston on a tourist visa. Since last year, Indian workers on visas have been constantly checking the visa website for open slots.Īatira Vijay, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, is one of them. In Nepal, people can’t even get visa appointments unless it’s a medical or business emergency, or there’s a death in the family. Applicants in Istanbul have to wait nearly two years. In Canada, there is a year’s wait for appointments at some U.S. consulates in India also have similar problems. Appointment availability changes weekly and there’s no guarantee Paik can actually get one. embassy in New Delhi, the city closest to Paik’s hometown, Chandigarh. The State Department’s website shows a wait time of more than eight months to get an appointment at the U.S. consulates and embassies … closed and a backlog was created,” said Annelise Araujo, an immigration attorney and chair of the New England chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “When the pandemic happened, a lot of the U.S. Rajandeep Singh Paik lifts his nine-month-old son Siraj after getting home from work.
These appointments are incredibly hard to get right now, with high demand and long wait times. To renew his visa, Paik needs to find an appointment for an in-person interview at a U.S. They can leave the United States but can’t re-enter. Paik, a rheumatologist in Malden, is among the thousands of working professionals - doctors, engineers, researchers and others - who are authorized to work and live in the U.S., but their work visas have expired so they are essentially stuck here. “We haven’t been able to meet any of our other family, any of our friends, you know, our pets back home, the streets of our hometown, the food we used to eat there,” he said. He hasn’t been home in more than two years. However, Paik, who lives in South Boston, cannot leave the United States because he wouldn’t be allowed to come back on his visa that expired during the pandemic. People are planning vacations and traveling internationally again. Rajandeep Singh Paik wants to celebrate his son’s first birthday in his hometown in India.
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