Argo Student Visa Week: A live conversation between 4 ex-Visa Officers

get really started in a few minutes um and thanks to everyone for coming to this webinar and for anyone who's come to all of our webinars throughout the week for student visa week and also a big thank you to all of the hosts of the webinar and participants of this webinar these are all x visa officers and they also all are offering their services as a consultant on argovisa.com so we're really grateful that they all joined us today and so a few other technical things to go over is first the raffle that we're having that allows um one person to get a free argo visa consultation so how you enter the raffle is by tagging your friends um in the facebook live stream i'll add a link to the live stream in the chat right now for people on zoom who want to enter and you can each each tag is one entry so if you tag 10 people you'll get 10 entries into the raffle so if you are interested in getting a free consultation you can start entering the raffle um whenever now and also a few other things at the end we will have a q a session that will be part of this whole session we're going to keep it in at an hour including the q a so if you're on zoom please send your questions in the q a button at the bottom rather than the chat um if you want you can send your q a questions anonymously so don't worry and if you're on facebook and you want to participate in the q a you can comment on the live stream on facebook and we'll try to get to as many questions as possible but of course we'll see what we can do with time um so that's pretty much all of the announcements again thanks to everyone for coming to our webinars throughout the week for student visa week and i just wanted to really give a warm welcome to all of these peace officers ex-visa officers here and just to go over their their government experiences between the four of them they've had government experiences in mexico china india sri lanka honduras indonesia hong kong colombia france and iraq i think that's all of the countries i might be missing something but we cover we're covering a lot of ground here and um i'll let them take it away and thanks everyone so much for joining um yeah thank you everybody for joining our live panel discussion um i was actually i was excited about all of the webinars but this was the one that i was really excited about because it's always so much fun to talk to other visa officers you know we've been through some very similar experiences in our line of work behind the visa window you know having high volume of visa applicants to talk to it is an extremely difficult job um i always commend my colleagues in the state department who are doing this right now because it is really hard probably this toughest job i've ever done in my life um and also you know there's just so much there's a lot of similarities between what we saw at different countries but there are some differences as well and so hopefully we'll get to delve into uh some of our experiences and share with you some of our insights that will be helpful to you especially if you are an international student who's applying for your student visa this year um we want to be helpful and we want to answer all of your questions so um i will be moderating this discussion and um i'm going to just go around and have each uh ex visa officer tell you a little bit about their experience and so um you know swati lisa and ben could you guys and i'll let's start with swati actually why don't you tell us how many years did you work for the us department of state and you know what countries and cities have you served in and also if you have any special expertise in any particular visa category i'm very happy too so i was with state department for 11 years as a diplomat and i had two and a half years prior to that with justice department and homeland security as an immigration officer so between those two i have uh cumulatively seven years in just consular related work so everything related to adjudications to immigration policy work i served in honduras in mumbai india twice and also on the mexico desk at the headquarters in dc um when i did a lot of green card adjudications with the other agencies my specialty became marriage fraud and when i was serving in india having just the cultural background and the languages that were used in my jurisdiction it really helped when i was doing green card adjudications in mumbai so they were able to you know free up a translator and allow me to do all those um and then a lot of um since i was one of the more senior officers and a bunch of junior officers in mumbai um i ended up getting some of the meaty portfolios so we had what we call the business executive program so under that i had the h1bs some b1b2s that were going for training and uh l-ones as well i also had the student visa portfolio uh the religious portfolio and then c1ds um which is a seaman and crew portfolio and um i got my fair share of otherwise complicated cases that's great swati that's a lot and um i have to say your expertise has always really um you know astounded our clients and you've always been super helpful in argo consultations and i always get great feedback about your work um could you tell us a little bit about you know how many years you've been with the department and your special areas of expertise yeah so swati and i actually joined the state department at exactly the same time um and i left the state department in 2016. but before doing that i had served in jakarta indonesia colombo sri lanka baghdad iraq and most recently in paris france also like swati i am a consular co-owned officer which means that my area of expertise and my motivation if you will for joining the foreign service was consular work and doing specifically the visa side of things um less so the american citizen side of things in sri lanka we saw all kinds of different visa applications also a lot of seamen a lot of students looking to study in the united states and obviously a lot of tourist applications and then in paris i was the immigrant visa chief so i did exclusively immigrant visas and i would say that is my area of expertise including um you know any kind any type of fraud that you would expect to see with immigrant visas i also worked in dc in the visa office for legal advisory opinions which meant i was there to assist consular officers who needed to maybe sometimes explain a little bit their decisions to attorneys and also to help them apply complicated visa regulations or laws that sometimes aren't always applied correctly so to provide clarification there and to be a resource and cover for consular officers out at our posts that's really amazing lisa and just you know with your experience in the legal office i just think of all of the consular officers i've worked alongside and just some of the tough you know questions that we're faced with whether they're legal questions or factual questions and definitely i remember we always had to you know keep in mind that we can consult with legal back in dc um to sort of help us make our decision so that's really great um yeah uh so ben why don't you take it away what how many years were you with the department and what would you say are your areas of expertise thanks mandy um well i was with the department for six years i did i did visas in guangzhou china starting off and then i did visas in bogota colombia so i had china and uh and latin america at the time both of those were two of the biggest posts in the world for visas so i definitely you know um earned my stripes during those two tours my final tour with the department was as the press secretary and spokesperson at the consulate in shanghai and then i left the department in 2018. um as for expertise i've done non-immigrant visas immigrant visas i was in the fraud prevention unit in bogota colombia i've done basically the entire alphabet of visas and trained officers as a more experienced visa adjudicator trained new officers when they came in on how to do those visas you know everyone's heard of the b visas for tourists and business people the f visas for students the h1bs and the l's but then there's other visa types that people might not be so familiar with like the a's the cs the m's even the r's i've done them all that's great thanks so much ben and um even though i've spoken at multiple webinars uh this week i'll just give a little uh intro myself uh i have experience at the u.s embassy in beijing china at the u.s consulate in matamoros mexico and finally at the u.s consulate in hong kong where i spent some time managing the immigrant visa unit and so i think between the four of us i mean we are just a wealth of information um especially for international students our focus this week is to help international students because you know it's been a really tough year last year i know a lot of people who have started out studying remotely are now looking to come back to campus and there's a lot of questions because things are honestly changing all the time depending on the covet situation on the ground in the country where the u.s embassy or consulate is at uh but also um you know what's going on with the state department back in dc and i i love my colleagues because honestly i'm looking at these faces and it sort of makes me feel like i'm back in a consular section again uh just because you know uh and this is probably a bigger section than in some of those like one-person posts where there's just one consular officer so it's always a lot of fun for me to get together with other former visa officers and sort of talk shop and talk about you know how we used to look at cases student visa cases in particular and so i'd also like um you know each of these ex visa officers to talk a little bit about you know what drew you to the work that we're doing at argo and why do you think you know a consultation with an ex-visa officer is valuable for visa applicants and why don't we um start with swati sure thank you thank you for that question so i had already been doing um ex visa consulting work prior to joining argo very exclusive tailored consultations so i already understood and appreciate know the value that we bring and as former consular officers who understand both sides of the window you know as i say because at least in mumbai we had that bulletproof glass between us and you know the applicants so i i can appreciate both sides of it um i also really really like about argo uh the user-friendly platform that it provides both for officers and for the visa applicants that come on board because there's so much versatility in terms of the technology we can connect to any applicant anywhere in the world depending on our expertise and we're providing really legit guidance so um also another thing i really appreciate is because we have such a wonderful pool of ex-visa officers on our team that there's resources amongst us so even if um you know i might get a questionnaire ahead of a consultation that may be a little bit more complicated i'm able to bounce it back with um colleagues on the team and see if you know there's something else that we can do or how we might go about certain complicated cases so uh with that cumulative worldwide experience it really i find it really really helps and um and i think as argobs we have a unique expertise you know there's no agent or even an immigration lawyer that can really provide the kind of guidance we do and that's because we have been on both sides of that window you know we we now we understand what it's like to actually adjudicate to be in a proper setting of a consulate or an embassy at a mill uh what we call a visa mill so um all of that stuff you know lawyers have the expertise but they're they've never been behind that window to necessarily uh understand what we are seeing and what we are experiencing how the process is going and then uh agents at least in countries like mumbai you know their dime a dozen and and they have a lot of cookie cutter kinds of services so i think as argos we have a very unique usp i think that's such a good point um swati because i find that most people who try to help visa applicants in their line of work they are you know just basing their experience off of feedback uh from their previous clients and i think this is the first time that you know people are able to get information from the source from the people who are making these decisions and why we make these decisions the way we do and um you know and i always talk with our other argo officers or argoffs as we call them uh that there is such a strong sense of consular culture that unless you've done this work and understand the pressures that we face it's really hard to kind of understand where we come from and how we make these decisions and so let's yeah let's um let's take it to lisa you know what what really drew you to the work that we're doing at argo and why do you think you know a consultation with argo is different than a consultation with some other type of agent well i mean i've always been a big proponent of legal immigration to the united states when i went to law school it was to become an immigration attorney and it was my area of focus in law school and i see working for argo as just a natural extension of that to to help people during their visa interviews because i know for a fact that there are qualified people that get refused every day i have personal close friends who've been refused for a visa and it was because they weren't prepared or they were prepared for the wrong types of questions um so i see my role as an argof to give people kind of that sneak peek of what it's going to be like at their interview not just the kinds of questions they're going to get but the tone of the interview the length of the interview and also too what a typical consular officer might look like is different from perhaps what you've imagined so i think it's all good exposure and i think it can really help people during their interview so that if they are qualified for the visa that they get it and that they're not tripped up by some innocent mistake such a good point lisa and i remember thinking that when i used to be on the visa line you know is this person is this sometimes you just don't really know and instead of having the time to be able to really figure it out it almost feels like it's safer to just refuse someone which is really unfortunate for that visa applicant because uh you know maybe they sent the wrong signals or something that they did innocently raised some red flags um and so let's bring it to ben last but not least you know what really drew you to your work at argo well i had a similar experience to that that you had lisa i had a personal friend when i was stationed in china who was going to apply for a visa and she asked me for any advice before she applied and the consular officers when they're in the state department have a very strong standard of ethics where they need to avoid even the appearance of impropriety and so even close friends family members they won't give them any advice on the visa process um because that would um you know there'd be proprietary advice that they're giving people that they know that's not available to the general public so i told her you'll have no problem i knew what her job was and her education i thought she'd have no problem um and she got refused and i had no idea why that would have been and i told her that's weird you should apply again but without giving her any advice and she applied again and she was refused again and i realized then that this process is a black box for people on the outside there's a lot of people purporting to have you know some inside knowledge or you know that secret sauce or that information that's going to help you get your visa but unless they actually worked behind that window approving visas and and sometimes having to deny visas they don't really know what's going on and so i realized at that moment that i had this special knowledge that that comes along with uh a very deep knowledge of the foreign affairs manual of the immigration regulations and also of how things work inside an embassy but also that empathetic knowledge of how people are doing this job on the inside after doing tens of thousands of these visas alongside our colleagues and peers who we talk about with them you know we work just like we do in argo we talk with our colleagues about these cases and we learn how people are thinking about these that i've got this unique skill set that can help people not go through that same situation that my friend went through um and so after i left the department it was just one of the number one things i always knew i was going to do was i was going to put this knowledge to use and help people avoid an unnecessary refusal like that thanks so much ben and i i completely agree with you three i think that you know argos work and i think you guys can all agree with me after every consultation i do i just feel so gratified because it really feels like i've made a difference in somebody's life and i did not necessarily expect to feel like that when i first started doing the work so um it really is life-changing at least for me and incredibly humbling because you know when you're a visa officer oftentimes you were just trying to get through the number of cases that you were doing but to realize now to have the time to work with people one-on-one and realize how important this visa interview really is and to be able to think about that has been really great for me um so what were some common mistakes you used to see visa applicants make at the window why don't we start with swati sure so i think a lot of times you know they wouldn't have paid their sevis fee they didn't have an updated i-120 from their school in case their program changed the duration change if their fees changed anything like that um they didn't fill out the ds 160 correctly and one of the big things is answering questions without really listening to the question um and that stems from like uh from being coached to give certain kinds of answers cookie cutter answers which end up making the applicant come across very robotic-like and they're not then able to express themselves more naturally to reveal their true intentions um what they wish to do uh with x y or z degree uh why they really want to study at a particular university so um those kinds of things i would really notice thanks so much swati why don't you jump right in lisa what were you some yeah i i take swati's point that you don't want to come off as coached and practiced but i would say that the most one of the most common mistakes i saw was that people would let the consular officer do the work in the interview like we shouldn't have to be dragging answers out of you so when a consular officer asks for example why do you want to study in the united states you should have more than a one-word answer or one sentence answer or if i ask you know why do you want to go to the united states to say to study it's like well i know that that's on my computer screen and i really think it's incumbent on the applicant at the first opportunity to volunteer that specific useful information that's going to help us make our determination so for example if the first question is why do you want to go the united states you know the answer should be more in line with where you're going to study what you're going to study why you want to study that and why you want to study it in the united states that saves us a lot of breath i think another common mistake especially if you're doing the interview in a language that you know is not the consular officer's native language is to speak slowly and perhaps to say the same thing in a couple different ways to make sure that that consular officer is really hearing what you're saying and processing it i mean we were joking the other day that as a consular officer you don't really have to understand every word an applicant is saying um so having that knowledge you want to make sure that your consular officer is really understanding what you're saying as well that's so true lisa thanks so much what do you think ben i i i would like to say something unique but i'm just gonna have to reiterate what lisa said because that's the number one thing for me uh when when people say study or tourism you haven't told me anything right there is a presumption that you as a visa applicant have immigrant intent right you're it's almost guilty before proven before you prove yourself innocent the burden's all on you if you don't give the the peace officer any information to that allows them to issue the visa they can just refuse the visa and move on and they're and they're validated by the law so it's on you to go in there proactively and give them the information that makes it easy to issue your visa right um whatever that visa officer asks you if they say uh why do you want to study in the u.s where are you going to travel in the us whatever whatever the question is the answer that they want is information that makes that decision easy for them right they want they want that information to pop out so that they see it and they know very clearly oh yes this is a good issuable visa i can put in these notes with this information issue this visa and then move on to the next one so you know you don't need to memorize something but know what your story is know what it is that that visa officer needs to know about you to make that decision quickly and then have that information at the you know at the tip of your tongue ready to tell them when they ask you something yeah you want to make the consular jobs the consular officer's job easy for them and and going back to the last question i mean i think this is another thing that's good about the argo consultation is applicants will get a sense of how many questions they get and how short the interview really is i think people are often caught off guard um that their opportunity to make their case has passed a lot quicker than than they they would have thought um i had an applicant who came in once with a briefcase he opened up his briefcase on the counter like he was about to start um you know his legal arguments at a trial and i'm sure he was really disappointed at how short his interview was um and that it wasn't going to be a day-long trial for him um so i think the the the consultation in the sense that we give a simulation is is is good preparation for having an idea of okay how many questions do i get before i really need to get my message out there across to the officer i think that's such a good point um ben and lisa and and just thinking you know i'm also a us immigration attorney and just talking with some of my immigration attorney colleagues it is hard to strike that balance because on the one hand you know i hear a lot of immigration attorneys tell their clients just say as little as possible because that gives you less opportunity to screw up and which is true in a sense but the one word answers used to just be so exhausting because you would ask five questions because before you're able to get any sort of substantive information or response out of the applicant and that definitely will not make your visa officer very happy or make their job easier in making a decision and on the other hand you know a lot of clients um that i've even seen come through argo it's like they just it's like word vomit you know you ask them a question it's like like everything comes out because they want so much for the visa officer to understand their situation and i think this is why argo is so valuable because we can really tell you you know what is going to be relevant and important to your case um and how to really you know get the visa officer to you know sit up and pay attention to you um which i think is really key to having that confidence to ac in the visa interview so thank you guys so much that's a really good point mandy about it's not it's not give them all the information immediately it's you need to know what the important information is and give that to them in a very concise condensed form that's so true couldn't agree more with everybody too it's you have to help the visa officer help you yeah that's exactly right help us help you um okay so this is this is kind of an interesting question i like to hear what people have to say about this what is something that you wish visa applicants would understand about consular officers and what we do at the visa window let's start with swati sure so you know since we're focusing mostly on students here i'll make it to particular about students so you have to understand that uh you know your visa officer is also just a human we have also been in that process of applying for colleges and you know trying to figure out what we wanted to study and why we wanted to study somewhere um so it's we we can relate to you know the motivating factors so you have to understand that you know that it's not a rocket science we don't plug in something into a formula and a magic answer kind of appears you know we're having um but we're also you know when when they come with their canned answers and you know a lot of students will be like uh it's uh oh because the class the professor to class ratio student ratio is wonderful they're kind of you know read off things from the website that they've memorized um but we we understand that you know there are other factors that go into you choosing your college it could be things like you had friends who studied there or you still have friends who study there maybe you know it's uh you have family nearby so you have a support system maybe the cost is affecting it the location all those kinds of things that we can understand are and it makes even more sense for why you would want to you know study somewhere and um choose to go there etc so um it's just more about having a conversation we have no innate desire to prevent you from achieving your dreams you know we have no quota system or other randomness we just uh want to best understand your inter intentions um in a brief conversation you know in the legitimacy of your reasons uh we have no set of predetermined questions a lot of people really wonder that you know and we have like one two three and if they answer like this is how no it's you know based on what my first question is is and how you answer is usually how our second question then gets developed um and you'll have a few questions just based off of that conversation it's also not about the paperwork you know a lot of clients like to shove the paperwork um but in student visas for example it's just it's what's required by law that you have to bring you know we want your i20 we want your service fee we want to know that you can financially cover it but everything else is you have to consider it as supplemental and i know you know a lot of agents um at least here in in india you know they tried to push like oh you really got to get all this paperwork together and and so then the clients when they get denied and you hear you know they didn't even look at my paperwork so a lot of times you're trying to explain to them well it's not about that you know it's about that flow of the conversation and how did you answer and stuff so uh and you used to joke sometimes and i really want to reiterate because i can't i'm surprised sometimes how many times people think you know oh they have a quota and um and so we would joke that uh you know no we didn't just come into work today and decide that everybody that's wearing red gets a visa or only the people that have ties on get a visa you know it's it's not frivolous like that we are taking into account um the ina our training you know and as ben said we have to in in non-immigrant visas the law presumes that you're an intending immigrant so it's about overcoming that that's such a good point swati and i feel like this is really why it is so hard to give generalized visa advice and everybody wants to know okay what's the answer to this question but really it depends based on who you are your circumstances how old you are your travel history your family history and so this is why sometimes when we answer questions we try to you know give a response that will be applicable to a lot of people and that can be really hard and why an argo consultation is so valuable because i think you know it's always so funny to me somebody will get refused a visa and they were asked a certain question you know like which school are you going to in the united states and maybe their answer is oh i'm going to this community college they were refused a visa so then they think that is the reason why they were refused and now they're out there on the internet or telling all of their family and friends you can never apply to a community college and get approved a visa which as you know we as visa officers know ex visa officers that is just simply not true and so like swati said it really depends on the flow of the conversation how you're presenting yourself and just because one person is asked a question and they responded a certain way and they were refused a visa it may not be the reason why they were refused that visa um and so i'd love to hear from you know lisa and what she thinks yeah i mean we well when when i was doing visa training we were actually briefed specifically on the benefits of having international students study in the united states um so we are predisposed to want to issue that student visa for every qualified applicant but i think what would be helpful for applicants to know is that the officer that you meet on the day of your interview may not look like they are predisposed to approve anything um and that could be for several reasons not everybody who is doing visa interviews dreamed of doing visa interviews when they became a diplomat um we're also under a lot of time pressure to get through as many applicants and to make our decisions as quickly as possible and it's and it's sad but true that i think it's really easy to carry over the emotions from our last interview to our next interview so um when you approach your consular officer they may not be in the best of moods for any variety of reasons but that should not stop you from making your pitch from being enthusiastic from being confident and i think knowing the reasons why a consular officer may not seem very friendly at the time of your interview can help keep you from taking it personally don't let it bring you down like you're there you have a clean slate um and perhaps after your interview the officer will be in a better mood even for the next applicant so i would say that's the one thing i wish people knew is that they shouldn't take it personally it is supposed to be a diplomatic exchange we're not technically law enforcement officers but um you know as you said consular officers are human too and if we think that there are some answers that we're not getting at then you might get some more direct um questions so you know when i do my argo consultations i flip my face for those simulations because i want my applicants to be prepared for the worst case scenario and to be ready to handle a consular officer that that maybe isn't feeling particularly diplomatic that day and to know that it's not them and it doesn't mean that their visas get about to be refused to not get discouraged but to persevere so great thanks so much lisa that's super helpful what do you think then yeah i i think it's absolutely the truth and something that applicants need to understand is that the visa officers are human and part of their situation is that they don't have all the information they don't have all the knowledge they have a little bit of training and then they're thrown into this job where they have the absolute responsibility and authority to make the decision on issuing or refusing that visa uh for instance on the sevis form uh they know that a student needs this they know what the important data is on that form that they need to know they don't know actually how students get that form they don't know who at the school fills out that form they don't know who a dso is they don't know how a service transfer happens but they still have to make a decision on that visa right um which is and and here's the other thing they are under a lot of time pressure they need to make that decision within two minutes two to three minutes optimally so they're under a lot of pressure to make that decision with limited information they don't know about the school that you've applied to they may have never seen it before or heard of it they don't know about the major you're applying for they might not know about the province where you come from they might not you know they don't know about your family situation but they still have to make that decision and knowing that you need to make sure that the information that they are considering is the information that you want to get in front of them i would also say um like with regard with regards to community college obviously those are perfectly legitimate universities where many americans and international students are doing their studies but when the officer does take into account the totality of someone's application if someone applies to harvard and gets into harvard the officer can assume okay this person already presented their entire academic cv okay harvard and harvard said okay this person qualifies to study with you know the top students in the world and so harvard's kind of already done that vetting before they come into the interview if someone's going to a community college while it may be a good college and they intend to do their studies there legitimately that community college might not have very stringent admissions standards they might not require an sat or act they might not require toefl scores which means that while legitimate students are getting admitted there could be some students who aren't really legitimately planning to study who have applied there and been accepted and that's why there's going to be more scrutiny if you apply to a community college you're definitely going to need to prove that you are as legitimate a student as that student who's been accepted to harvard i think that's such a good point thanks so much ben and i know we get a lot of questions about community colleges versus four-year universities so i i hope that's helpful um to some members of our audience okay so i love this question because i'm actually curious to see what you guys think too you know people often ask us you know they've had their visas refused a number of times um can you explain certain situations where you would consider issuing somebody a visa even though they have been denied you know one or more times swati yes sure so you know it's always best to come to us for an argo consultation when you're going for your first time because then we can prepare you the best way possible but and then you have to understand is that every time you get denied it makes it that much harder for you to overcome your situation it's not impossible but it is harder so you have to then put in more effort so if on your first time it was because you know you were really nervous and you couldn't um you didn't understand the questions and you couldn't uh explain yourself um the second time you're probably gonna be even more nervous and you're gonna have that from your first interview kind of playing in your um head even though you get a new officer so and in those kinds of situations just you have to understand that all visa officers i think i speak for is that honesty is the best policy and you know all we really want is somebody to be uh honest with us about uh their intentions for the visa that they're applying for what they're gonna do with it and what they're gonna do afterwards and when they're going to come back etc and you know if you've made a mistake it's not the end of the world but the most important thing is is that you own up to it you know you apologize for it um that maybe you did something like a lot of you know sometimes it's silly things like on the ds 160 you know you have uh maybe an agent facilitated and you haven't reviewed it yourself and therefore what is on your paper doesn't match what you're saying so it could be you know something like you have family in the u.s and maybe out of fear of hearsay uh because friends and family told you don't say that you have family in the u.s even if you do you might have marked no ones but then in the interview it came out that yes you do have family so that creates a confusion and it leads the officer to think okay well if they're lying about this then what else are they lying about you know so you want to be very clear you want to correct anything that you may have done either you know um purposely and own up to it also um you know another time is when you're able to better articulate you know and clearly explain your situation your circumstances and how they may have changed for you to now be able to better qualify for that visa thanks so much swanty such a good point what do you think lisa um well i think it definitely depends on why you were refused obviously the reason for the refusal but the thing to know is that a consular officer is presuming that the previous decision was a correct decision so now if you're coming back for a second interview your hurdle is even bigger and what your second interviewing officer is looking for is a change of circumstances that would give them a reason to overcome the previous refusal so without that it is hard to overcome a refusal we would not recommend you just apply again to play the the visa officer lottery to see if you get a nicer officer because that that off that second officer may be nicer but she's presuming that the previous officer's decision was the correct decision but refusal you can overcome a refusal i've i've overcome previous officers decisions many times sometimes even overcoming lifetime bars for applicants but they have to demonstrate a change in circumstances or an explanation for if if the problem is a lie an explanation for the lie that's believable in order to overcome that refusal that's great thanks so much lisa what do you think then yeah in my time at the state department i think i may have overturned um at least a thousand prior refusals but that's just me i definitely had colleagues who may have overturned one in their entire time and it comes down to the officers having sole discretion whether to issue that visa or not and that includes prior refusals a new a second officer can approve any visa that's been previously refused as long as there's no what we call a hard ineligibility if you got 214b before as your refusal the next officer has the sole authority to issue your visa or refuse at that next interview right it's completely new interview but things that will come into play are unfortunately that every officer is different and their personality um how willing they are to go against their colleagues previous decisions um their and it really it takes uh it takes boldness it takes some bravery you're asking that officer to be brave and to go against what their colleague who they work with every day has already done they might not necessarily you know have to tell them that they've done it but you know they know what they're doing is saying okay i disagree with what my colleague said and maybe it's a colleague that they respect and they wouldn't want to do that so when when someone's been previously refused especially recently a lot of times the officer will see that there's a previous refusal and they'll want to get them through the the door as quick as possible by asking the question has anything changed since your last interview well it may have been one week ago so you might say well no nothing's changed that's all the officer was looking for that gave him all the reason he needed to say okay nothing's changed since the prior refusal he refused again but what may have changed is that you didn't get to present the information that's important to your case to the previous officer so you need to have that information so then when they ask you that question you can say well the officer didn't consider this information because i never got to tell him this him or her this in the last interview and then you get your window to get that new information in front of the officer and give them a legitimate reason to change the decision right oh it's new information it wasn't that my colleague was wrong so my colleague didn't have complete information now i have complete information and i can issue this visa confidently and i'm not just you know flying in the face of my colleagues decisions i think that's such a good point ben and i feel like you know from talking to all three of these former visa officers you know it's and i completely agree with this it's a bad idea to get refused once and then just hope that you know the situation will be different next time you want to do something different um so that you can rectify that situation if possible and to get things turned around um it would be crazy to go in there exactly the way you did the first time or the second time um hoping for a different result and so i would say that if you are a student who has been refused a visa or any any applicant who's been refused a visa and you're planning on applying again consult with argo before you do that because we can help you point out you know some of the things that might have gone wrong or some miscommunication or misunderstanding which is all very possible because you know visa officers have to make these decisions in a very short amount of time and one other thing i wanted to mention too is that keep in mind that every single time you go into an embassy or consulate and have that visa interview it's all going to be in your visa record and your visa record is for life and every single visa officer you talk to will have access to the notes of the previous interview so you really want to do the you know the best you can to keep that record pristine so there's not a lot of problems in it you know causing you know your next visa officer a lot of headache and not really you know being willing to approve you that visa because there's so many things wrong with your case um so please keep that in mind that's a great point mandy i do also want to add something that's really important for prior refusals that those notes will live forever and any officer in the future will be able to see what went on in that interview but that's the only place where that exists no one can tell you why you got refused with certainty right um no agent no one has a connection with the embassy they can't ask them they can't you know there's no way for anyone to know what happened in that interview other than having those notes and even looking at those notes sometimes i would see a previous refusal and think well i would have just issued according to this information um so don't believe anyone that tells you that they know for certain why you got refused but we as the former visa officers who i did 60 over 60 000 visas i'm sure that lisa and swati and mandy i know you did a hundred thousand it's that experience and that that empathetic that cognitive empathy we have with other peace officers that allows us better than anybody else better than visa agents better than immigration attorneys to intuitively know what it is in your application that could have caused that officer to give you a 214b so we'll admit to you from the very beginning we do not know with certainty why you got refused but we can also tell you that of anybody out there who can give you advice ours is going to be the most accurate i love that ben i think that's such a good summary of what we're trying to do at argo um and so i i think you know i could keep going with the questions but i just see all of these uh you know q and a questions kind of coming up and i think we could start answering some of these questions what do you think davis great yeah there's lots of questions so i think a good one to start with kind of relates to what you all are talking about about the refusals and so do the visa officers type and record every single response that someone's saying during the interview or is it just like a summary after they're probably typing just enough to justify their decision so if they're refusing you they're just typing the negative things that justify the refusal unless they think that potentially you could qualify in the future they may add that caveat but they're they're not capturing the whole essence of the interview by any means a few sentences a few sentences probably i agree okay great so the next question is are u.s consular officers trained on common cultural tendencies from the country where they're working sometimes applicants may come off as robotic because this is how they would normally communicate with people and authority positions and rules that is a very good point uh yes they are trained however there's a learning curve i arrived in china after already having lived in china for five years and having a master's degree in chinese studies and chinese history um i i knew about china i had colleagues though who had learned a chinese in the u.s and then arrived in china and were told to do visa interviews on day one obviously there's a disparity in the level of cultural knowledge there so some will know more than others there is an attempt to have them trained in uh in cultural norms for that country though i just like to add on this point you know we usually have an assignment for two years um sometimes three years depending on the post and so even if we're new to that culture during the course of our assignment we get very used to um the nuances of you know the culture and and what is applicable in certain kinds of visa cases and stuff because we end up doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these through the the course of our assignment so it almost becomes very second nature to us um you know we can do them with our eyes closed if we didn't need the computer to type uh so we do definitely accumulate um some on the ground knowledge that helps us um and we have you know regular they'll usually be internal staff meetings if there's something you know unique that has come up to maybe something in your jurisdiction so to keep everybody abreast but yes in the beginning we also get um usually we get kind of regional uh training to make us a little bit more aware of the culture we're going into um socio-political geographical kind of basic general knowledge as well okay great so another common question is there any advice on dress code for the interview i know we've heard this in other webinars and it seems like people are really um conscious about this particular issue i would say to try to not try too hard um i'm thinking about international students in particular um you probably i don't know i'm curious to see what my other fellow argo officers think but i always think it's best to dress like a student um so maybe that is not the time if you you know are gonna go crazy and get like crazy tattoos and like do crazy hair colors maybe that's not the time to do it is before your visa interview but you also don't want to try too hard and you know one of our other argo officers um also argo's co-founder yesterday and i were talking about this specific issue and he was saying you know it always like is so funny to me when somebody wears an outfit that you could tell like they're wearing for the very first time if they're wearing a suit you can see all the crease lines of like when they took it out of the package and then you know this person is really trying hard for their visa interview so don't try too hard um try to be authentic to who you are but also keep in mind that um the visa officer is looking at you as a potential student who's going to go to the united states and spend you know a long time there so they need to trust in their decision that you're a good person to give a visa to absolutely the officer is only going to issue the visa if they trust you and trust is related to authenticity you have to be yourself you're not going to trick them by putting on a suit if you're uh if you're a hipster dress like a hipster that's the other thing i would just add here is that you know it if you're comfortable in your own skin with what you're wearing you know if it's if it's more your normal kind of what you would wear then you are going to naturally be more comfortable in the interview because you are feeling like yourself so your your nervous energy is not going to be as high also so those kinds of things do add up and they'll make a difference for you to make sure you're you know comfortable you're presentable but uh you're also feeling good in what you're wearing okay great um so we have an interesting question and i think it would be really cool to hear what you guys have to say so someone asked can you all tell about the most memorable and unique interview you ever had i can start with that one and i've told this story a few times during my webinar so if you've seen me speak before i'm sorry if it's a repeat but it's it's actually unfortunate i interviewed um i went for a temporary assignment at the us consulate in chengdu and i interviewed a couple who a brand new newlywed couple and they were going on their honeymoon to the united states and they were actually interviewing um with the wife's parents and they said you know and the husband was saying my in-laws are coming with us on our honeymoon and i refuse to this couple right away because in an american officer's you know mentality there is just no way that a newlywed couple would bring in-laws with them on their honeymoon and so um and this sort of relates to what we're talking about you know whether or not officers learn about cultural customs sometimes we learn through visa interviews and um and so unfortunately for this couple who was refused along with their parents i only found out after seeing this repeat pattern over the next few days that this is actually quite a normal custom in south western china where elderly parents don't speak the language and they're uncomfortable going somewhere so far away but they do want to go see the united states and so the younger generation even though they're newlyweds are you know are doing this for their parents sort of as a way to thank them for their support and to bring them along so this is actually quite normal in china um and i didn't find that out until later so sometimes these officers unfortunately learn you know trial by error through the applications that they deal with through the visa applicants that they talk to and if you're one of the first ones that i interviewed you were unfortunately probably wrongly denied but i learned and then figured it out for the the next uh visa applicants and so that's just a really memorable uh interview for me and i actually ended up talking to the local staff afterwards learned that this is quite common wrote a cable back to the state department and then you know got kudos and everybody was like oh who knew that this was actually you know quite a normal situation so um we do try to educate other visa officers on some of the things that we see at the window to prevent these types of mistakes um from playing out on our visa applicants and we for the most part i think these officers try so hard to do the right thing but we face immense pressure and um you know we have a lot of limitations i just have a funny story i was interviewing an elderly gentleman who did not speak uh a stan didn't speak chinese standard chinese very well and i asked him we have to fingerprint everyone right when they come for their visa interview and i asked him to put his hand on our fingerprinting machine i was trying to mime to him you know take your hand your four fingers put them on the fingerprinting machine right here put them right there so i can take your fingerprints and he was confused but then i saw he ah he understood and he took out his false teeth and put them in the slot and gave them to me through the window and i was like okay we need to get some sanitation equipment over here we need to clean this man's teeth um so yeah i just have a funny story i have um you know i i have uh you know amongst all of the experience that we all have it's we have a lot of stories really actually there's many many um that come through the years and it's hard to remember all of them but uh there is one um once i was uh see in the foreign service a lot of times for your post you get uh language training and it may not be your first language so um i i had but you get um kind of very formal language training so i remember an officer this wasn't my own thing but i was passing her window on the way to my window and she had been trained in i believe it was gujarati and um she but it was very very formal gujarati so uh but it's not what is really spoken right so she's interviewing i'm passing by her window and she's interviewing this uh young family um of three and uh the kids in like grade school and so she switches and then starts talking to the kid and she's saying uh she said the word for something she was asking him about you know what grade are you in school and the word she used for school was super formal it was the proper formal word but nobody knows it nobody uses it so all three of them were like uh you know i could just see the expression like okay what what is she saying plus she's not a native speaker so you know this goes to the miscommunications that can happen because of the language difference the accents uh between the either the applicant or uh the officer uh the speed at which we talk and all that kind of stuff and all the more important to ask to repeat the question if you didn't understand it or anything so anyway so she says this formal word everybody is quiet and uh then finally you know and then uh the kid's like and then she goes school you know what school do you go to or what's generating school and like oh school like that everybody had to sign a sigh of relief because like oh okay yeah he's in fourth grade you know so um sometimes that kind of miscommunication happened when we're trying to make our best effort to relate to the applicant in their language yeah i didn't know there's um i'm going through the rolodex of interesting visa interviews i've had and it's so hard to pick just one but i think what really struck me interviewing people in paris for fiance visas and spousal visas was the myriad of ways that people across borders can meet and get together and maybe this was unique to to french people i didn't um from pen pals to buffy the vampire slayer fan sites to is it what's the farm game that you can play apparently you can communicate you know on your phone where you build your farm had a couple that met playing bad um so yeah you know if you're single just never give up because you never know how you're gonna meet that special person in your life that's great thanks for sharing all those stories so we're almost out of time but i want to try to do one more quick question um are there any circumstances in which you would recommend someone not to apply for a non-immigrant visa because there's no way that they would be approved i'll i'll start with this one so i wouldn't say um i would say you know when we were talking about situations or situation has changed so a lot of times um you know when when applicants at our window would say you know oh but when can i apply again like let's say they got denied they would immediately ask well when can i apply again um you know we would tend to then by law they could really turn around and go ahead and apply the next day but that was not going to necessarily change their circumstance if they came in like ben was saying the next week you know so what we would recommend to them you know we would tell them that yes you can apply immediately if you'd like but we would recommend you wait maybe six months in case something can change in your circumstance so just to keep that in mind you know um that you really want to invest in in making your case stronger and and and you don't want to do visa shopping is either you know before like right now in india the rules have changed and you can apply for your visa anywhere but before um maybe 10 years ago you couldn't you could only apply in your jurisdiction so when you saw applicants outside of your jurisdiction it automatically put alarm bells up for people that okay they didn't get their h-1b in the h-1b visa mill down in south india so now they're coming to india i mean they're coming to mumbai so you don't want to come across as you just desperately no matter what and where need to get a visa okay great well thank you to all the panelists for attending and also all of the attendees for coming oh ben did you want to say something oh no i wasn't sure because he went off mute so i was like just in case um yeah so thanks everyone for attending all of the panelists and all of the attendees um you can check out this we'll live on facebook so you can rewatch it or share with your friends on our facebook at argo visa for usa um the num i mean for not the number four and um yeah and i will announce the raffle winner in the comments of the facebook and thanks so much to everyone for coming if any of you guys want to say one more thing um how about it we wish you guys the best of luck in applying for your us visa and we hope that we can help you so please come have a consultation with us we're happy to help i second that yeah it's good talking to everybody and i hope that everybody has the best of luck applying for their visas absolutely come see us come consult with us we wish you the best thanks everyone

Channel: Argo Visa

Views: 27,042

Keywords: student visa week, f1 visa, student visa, j1 visa, visa officer, visa officer help, visa officer discussion

Id: 31MVSNoMG1Q

Length: 62min 25sec (3745 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021