US visas stamped or pasted on applicants’ passport pages may soon become part of the past, as the Biden administration has successfully completed a pilot project to issue “paperless visas.”
“We did our first small scope pilot of a paperless visa, which means that the visa process is the same but there’s no physical visa in someone’s passport. We just piloted this for the first time, so this is not something that’s going to be happening in the next year.”
Julie Stufft, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Visa Services, answered questions from foreign correspondents at a media roundtable hosted by the Foreign Press Centre.
It will take us probably 18 months to have widespread use of this or longer.
Stufft hopes that the need to provide a physical document will disappear in the future.
“That will ultimately, in the future, as some other countries do, require an app or something that allows people to show their visa status without the physical paper in their passport. We are very, very excited about that.”
She expected that paperless visas would be issued to Indian citizens as well.
I hope as soon as possible. But this is a long-term project that we have just piloted for the first time. I think we will see widespread use of this not for another year or so, or maybe longer.
The official noted the differences with the e-visa, as the process of obtaining would still imply going through an interview.
“So an interview is still required by law. If you are a first-time applicant, you will apply in the same way with the same forms. If you are getting a paperless visa, it will look all the same until the point where there is no paper.”
The option to renew a visa without submitting physical paperwork will make the process easier for both applicants and visa services, as challenges with mailing documents would disappear, Stufft claimed.
We have already done the small pilot. Now we are branching out to other types of visas. We started with our embassy in Dublin (…) We fully expect to expand that regionally and throughout the world. It will be piece by piece though.
