Avoid a Visa Refusal in 2023

I'm a former visa officer and I want to tell you about the number one reasons why you might get refused a visa in 2023. Let's start with the less common refusals and then at the end of this video I'll talk about the most common reason why someone would get refused their visa this year. Well the less common reasons are these things called ineligibilities. What is an ineligibility? These are clauses in the law that say that someone who has engaged in this act or has this on their record is ineligible to get a visa. There are a lot of specifics in there but some of the main ones are committing misrepresentation fraud when trying to get a visa issued. Another one might be having overstayed in the U.S. on a previous visit. Another one might be having committed a crime that rises above the threshold of committing a crime involving moral turpitude which all of which will result in a ban on being able to get a visa. These are formal bans. When you get that refusal sheet it will say this is the code under the Immigration and Nationalities Act. This is the code that makes you ineligible and each of those is going to have a duration of time. Each of those is going to have different requirements for getting a waiver if you are eligible for a waiver. So those are what are called ineligibilities but what's more common than that and by more common I mean 10 times, 20, 30 times more common than that is going to be what's called 214B. That's also just a code from the law but what that means is that every visa applicant in the visa officer's eyes is viewed as having immigrant intent. Immigrant intent is not allowed with a non-immigrant visa. There are a few exceptions but for most people if you're applying for a B1, B2, if you're applying for an F1, if you're applying for a J visa you cannot be seen by the visa officer as intending to immigrate to the U.S. Now here's the key. They start from assuming that you have that immigrant intent. You don't start off innocent until proven guilty like you would in the U.S. legal system. They assume that you are guilty from the beginning. You don't even start off neutral and then they decide whether to take it down to refusal or take it up to issuance. In theory every single visa applicant starts at refusal. That's the presumption that the visa officer should refuse you for immigrant intent and then it is your responsibility. It's incumbent upon you to prove to the visa officer's satisfaction that you do indeed overcome the presumption of immigrant intent and you do merit getting that visa issued. So how do you do that? Well it's going to be different in everyone's case but the first thing to know is what is going to make that visa officer think that you are intending to immigrate. Then you're going to need to know how to defend against that. If you've been refused your visa, well everyone's visa interview is different. We as former visa officers at Argo, we've done tens of thousands, a million visa interviews total in aggregate amongst all of us. We've done so many of these that our experience has allowed us to intuitively be able to know what happened during that interview when you recount what happened, what questions you were asked, how did you respond to those questions, and in almost every single case we know exactly what the problem was when we hear you tell us that story. Come to us, find out why you might have been refused, come to us before your interview, find out how to avoid that refusal in the first place. We're going to help you get your visa issued.