The Administration Is Tackling African Visa Dysfunction
The State Department’s consolidation of visa offices in Africa helps to stymie one conspicuous source of illegal immigration.
Marco Rubio’s State Department will slash the number of U.S. offices in Africa processing visas for foreigners seeking to come to the United States. The almost 50 U.S. embassies and consulates that are currently processing visa applications will be reduced to 20 to take advantage of economies of scale. This will save taxpayer dollars from maintaining offices and staff that mostly just refuse visas anyway; it is also likely to slow the number of Africans who secure visas only to overstay in America. Donald Trump–haters will call this racism. Supporters will call it saving taxpayer money.
The United States currently issues and refuses both immigrant and nonimmigrant visas at some 50 posts across Africa (out of 54 countries there). Immigrant visas (IVs), also known as green cards, represent a relatively small amount of the business. The way immigrant visas are typically refused in Africa (officially called 221(g)) multiple times before finally being issued—sometimes years after the process started (as if your “Incomplete” in sophomore English Composition was still hanging over you years after graduation)—makes refusal rates appear artificially high and encourages bad statistical comparisons. Also, the Trump administration in January 2026 already suspended all immigrant visa processing for 26 African countries anyway, so this new development causes fewer concerns than it might seem at first glance.
The nonimmigrant visas (NIVs) in Africa, mostly tourist visas, are overwhelmingly refused. To avoid complaints, the State Department closely holds actual refusal numbers per post. Nevertheless, State is required to release refusal statistics by nationality, and that tells the tale. Some of the highest refusal rates in Africa are for Liberians (78.4 percent), Somalis (77 percent), Burundis (65.5 percent), Beninese (61.5 percent), and Chadians (58.6 percent). And those numbers are pre–Trump II. In comparison, the historical refusal rates for most European countries were so low (below 3 percent) that the U.S. gave up even requiring visas from them years ago.
It is hard to identify the point of maintaining a visa office in a far-flung part of Africa just to say “no” over and over again. State’s standard reply has to do with maintaining good relations with a given host country (questionable on the face when there are so many refusals and/or immigrant visa processing is shut down completely). This also hints at an answer to why the U.S. has so many embassies and consulates in countries that arguably have little to do. Much of this network was established during the Cold War, when Washington viewed newly independent African states as key battlegrounds in its global competition with the Soviet Union. As African countries gained independence, both the United States and the USSR sought political influence, military access, and votes in international organizations. Establishing embassies also allowed the Americans to monitor Soviet activities and USAID contractors of varying sobriety and propriety. Although the Cold War ended in 1991, the diplomatic infrastructure remained in place, as State resisted moves toward regional “hub” embassies. State still seeks to justify the mass of posts, claiming they are there to counter the usurious Chinese Belt and Road Initiative without really explaining how they do that. Hosting movie nights?
No need to worry, however, about the small percentage of Africans who might have succeeded in obtaining nonimmigrant visas in their home countries. Some 20 U.S. visa posts will remain open, and the applicants can apply there. The “closed” visa posts will still assist American citizens and process special national interest visa cases and diplomatic applications. As for the rest, few African capitals have direct flights to the U.S. mainland anyway, so many travelers can apply en route. Applicants must travel internationally to reach the United States, so requiring some of them to travel to regional visa hubs is not an unreasonable burden. It’s an old system; during my time processing visas in London, the embassy reserved a number of appointments for Iranian citizens, who would fly in on a weekly Swiss Air flight, get their visa, and head off to New York even as the U.S. maintained no diplomatic relations with Tehran.
There are two main reasons to shut down these African visa posts. Refusal rates are high enough to question maintaining separate processing facilities in every country. Maintaining an American diplomat overseas to process visas is expensive. He needs government housing, an office, a local staff, administrative support, security escorts, transportation, language training, education allowances for children, hardship and danger pay, and more, plus the actual sunk costs of his salary, benefits, and pension. There is no single official figure, because costs vary widely by country, rank, and family size.
Nevertheless, a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the State Department spent about $3.1 billion on pay, benefits, and allowances for roughly 9,000 U.S. direct-hire employees serving overseas in FY 2023. That works out to an average of about $344,000 per overseas employee per year. An earlier 2006 GAO study estimated the cost of placing a U.S. Foreign Service officer overseas at approximately $400,000 annually. None of this even tries to calculate the lost cost of having that expensively-trained diplomat spend his time saying no to visas in Monrovia when he could be working on much more critical issues in Beijing.
The other reason to shut down these visa -issuing posts is because it will probably slow down the number of visas issued to African travelers and thus the number of visa overstays in the U.S. Because the U.S. does not comprehensively track overstays, there is no single, reliable headcount. However, the best source is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Entry/Exit Overstay Report, which calculates overstay rates by nationality for visitors admitted as business or tourist travelers. It shows overstays for Africans ranged from a high of 49 percent for Chadians, to 7 percent for Ghana. Keep in mind this rate is not the number of a country’s citizens living illegally in the United States (no one knows that number because the census cannot by law ask about citizenship status). It is the percentage of a specific year’s visitor admissions that DHS could not confirm departed on time. Considering over 20,000 tourist visas are issued per year most every year just for Ghanaians, even 5 percent overstay by them represents a large and ever-growing number of actual people.
So what do we call the shutdown of visa posts in Africa? A good start.
The post The Administration Is Tackling African Visa Dysfunction appeared first on The American Conservative.
