Introduction

The United States is a melting pot of cultures and a land of opportunity for many individuals around the world. However, the process of obtaining a US visa can be a daunting task for many. The visa application process is governed by complex rules and regulations that are subject to change, making it difficult for applicants to navigate. Additionally, the visa approval and denial rates can vary depending on various factors such as the applicant’s country of origin, the purpose of the visit, and the visa category. Most recently, travel restrictions have increased due to COVID-19, with many countries still exercising increased processing times and rules despite overcoming the peak of the pandemic. 

Since tourism is a major contributor to the US economy, studying the trends of the US tourism along with visa applications and approvals, policymakers and business can gain insights into how visa policies are affecting tourism. However, studying the trends of the US tourism and nonimmigrant visa does not only benefit businesses but also, people that are planning on visiting the US as a tourist. This allows them to gain insights into when is the best time to visit and what are the policies and factors they should be aware of. 

This report will be covering the trends of tourism in the US by visualizing nonimmigrant visas issued by countries from 2011 to 2022, nonimmigrant visa types, and the changes in passenger travel over the last decade. In this lab report, we will use data visualization techniques to analyze and visualize data on US visa restrictions and different visa types, approval rates, and denial rates to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that impact US travel and visa application process.

Methodology

We selected datasets from immigration-related sites, such as the US Census Bureau, World Tourism Organization, The U.S. Department of State, and other supporting datasets from Statista. 

After datasets were chosen, these were cleaned using OpenRefine and Excel. Specifically, Excel was used to quickly clean for formatting, such as deleting extra rows and columns to facilitate future data extraction. Since our source pages contained many separate datasets over a range of years, we used OpenRefine to group and join multiple datasets under a common variable, typically Country Name for our examples. 

After datasets were cleaned and condensed, visualizations were created using Tableau. We aimed to use a variety of visualization types to highlight the changes in travel over the last 10 years and the differences in travel restrictions by country. To do so, we used a combination of world maps and combined bar and line charts. 

UX Research Methods

We created a survey about the US visa application experience:

– Where are you from? 

– What type of nonimmigrant visa did you apply for and what year?

– On a scale of 1-10 (1 being the lowest, 10 being the highest), how would you rate your overall experience with the US visa application process?

– How long did it take for you to complete the visa application?

– Did you encounter any difficulties?

– Was your visa application ever affected by COVID-19? (2020 – 2021)

– Did you feel like you were treated fairly and respectfully throughout the application?

– On a scale of 1-5 (1 being the lowest, 10 being the highest), were you nervous about the application process and outcome?

– Were you satisfied with the outcome?

– Describe the experience of visa application in 3 words. 

Then, we recruited participants who are foreigners that have visited the US, are currently in the US on a nonimmigrant visa, obtained the US visa before, or attempted to apply for visa. 

With this, we visualized the tourism in the US and visa issuing trends, and conducted an observation focusing on how participants analyze the visualizations and if they gain some insights on the topic or if they make sense to them. 

Finally, we compared the survey results and the visualizations.

Visualizations and Analysis

The first visualization we created is a line graph of nonimmigrant visas issued by country from 2013 to 2022. These are the top 10 countries that have the highest rate of nonimmigrant visas issued.

This line graph shows how the nonimmigrant visa issuing trend had dropped significantly from 2019 to 2021 for all countries. This is known due to COVID-19 due to travel restrictions, embassy closures, reduced staffing in the US embassies, changes to visa policies – some visa types were temporarily suspended, and quarantine requirements. 

The line graph shows that China had always had the highest visa issued until 2019 where the rate dropped dramatically. The nonimmigrant visa issuing rate had increased significantly from 2020 for Mexico, India, and Brazil, but not China. 

Overall, based on research, a combination of factors including trade tensions, US government policies, the COVID-19 pandemic, and increased scrutiny of Chinese visa applicants may have contributed to the drop in nonimmigrant visa issuance for China in 2019 and the subsequent slow recovery.

The second visualization shows the top 15 countries that were issued nonimmigrant visas from 2013 to 2022). As you can see, Mexico has the highest number of nonimmigrant visas issued at 13.7 million. Followed by China at 13.1 million and India at 7.9 million and so on. 

This horizontal bar graph finalized the result from the previous line graph. China started with the highest number of nonimmigrant visas issued from 2013 to 2019. However, after 2019, China’s rate had dropped dramatically, resulting in Mexico passing China.

To supplement the top 10 countries with nonimmigrant visas issued, the following area chart breaks down the most common nonimmigrant visa types for each country and their changes in issue numbers over the last decade.

Here we also observe that overall, issue numbers dropped sharply after 2020 for all U.S. nonimmigrant visas, with student visas (in red) experiencing the greatest drops. Specifically, student visas issued to China decreased over 78% from 652,259 in 2019 to 140,935 in 2021. The second country with the greatest percent decline is Brazil, where student visas dropped from 78,101 in 2019 to 23,470 in 2021, which is over a 69% decline. Tourist visas for all countries generally experienced the same sharp declines due to COVID-19 related travel restrictions. For instance, tourist visas for Canada decreased over 92% from 12,527,074 in 2019 to 983,514 in 2021. However, it’s important to note that Canadians do not require a visa for tourism in the United States, so tourist visas were most likely issued to residents in Canada holding other nationalities. As a result, some of the sharp declines in issued visas may be attributed to logistical variables beyond travel restrictions. 

The fourth visualization we created is a pie chart showing the proportion of each type of visa and as a whole.

According to the pie chart, the top 4 most issued visa types are B-1/B-2 visa, which is the tourist and business visa, and has the highest issuing rate of them all. Followed by a combination of B1/B2 and Border Crossing Card, then H which is a Temporary Worker and Trainee visa, and lastly F which is a student visa. 

Analyzing this pie chart can give viewers an idea of what is the main contributor of foreigners in the US. 

The fourth visualization is a bar chart showcasing the shift of nonimmigrant visa types throughout 2018 to 2022.

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/sandy3600/viz/VisaIssuedbyType2018-2022/Sheet7

The animation shows how the nonimmigrant visa issuing rate had dropped from 2019 and dropped dramatically from 2020 to 2021 and slowly increasing in 2022. From looking at the visualization, the F visa which is a student visa got affected the least by COVID-19 and other factors while the rate jumped back quickly in 2020. This shows that the issuing of F visa was the least affected by COVID-19 compared to other types of visas. 

To supplement the changes in visa issue rates, we also created an animated visualization on the top countries that were denied US visas over the last decade. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/anyelina.wu.zhai/viz/touristrefusals/Sheet2?publish=yes

In general, the most denials are sourced from countries within Africa and Southeast Asia. Occasionally, countries experiencing civil unrest will make it among the top countries refused visas, such as Afghanistan in 2018 and 2019. Unsurprisingly, countries most affected by travel restrictions after COVID-19 have also seen high visa refusal rates, such as China with a refusal rate of 79.09% in 2021. Accordingly, it is possible that strict travel bans in 2020 have caused some major countries to pause visa requests altogether, resulting in a drop in refusal rates as well. Most of the countries listed in 2020 are specifically located in Africa and the Middle East, where travel restrictions were less severe. The pattern thus changes when travel bans are lifted in 2021-2022 where countries like China and Canada appear on the list again.

UX Research Results

Based on the survey results, we found that the participants’ visa application process were affected by COVID-19. One also mentioned that they decided to wait another year before applying for a tourist visa due to COVID-19 restrictions and for their own safety concerns. 

Another factor that affected the tourist visa application was a 1 year wait period of the interview appointment.

Moreover, participants that are from the top 20 countries with the highest visa refusals rated their nervousness throughout the visa application process higher compared to participants that are not from the countries listed. When asked why they rated their nervousness as high, they said “I’ve seen my friends get their student visa rejected and also my tourist visa got rejected before”.

Participants’ take on our visualizations

Overall, the surveyed participants felt closely connected to the trends in our visualizations. They sympathized with the decline in student visas issued after 2020, especially as their countries tightened travel restrictions along with the U.S. embassies making visa requests more challenging and frustrating. One participant was surprised that their country, China, was not the highest among the top countries with the most nonimmigrant visas issued, where the highest was among Mexico, India, and Brazil. They thought the number seemed to be higher due to frequent complaints from Chinese citizens requesting U.S. visas. This response further highlights that despite frequent travels to the U.S., not all countries experience equal and fair levels of visa-related difficulties. 

Conclusion

Our research and visualizations overall portray the complications of travel and visas to the United States, especially over the last decade. The data shows that even among the top countries requesting the most U.S. visas, high refusal rates are not always linked to those countries, and are instead dependent on country-specific logistics and restrictions. As a team, we thought that this report was a great opportunity for us to be aware of the worldwide challenges regarding U.S. travel, and we realized that it affects more countries than we were aware of. We enjoyed Tableau due to its wide variety of visualization choices and we challenged ourselves with using new features such as animations. It was, however, challenging to use Tableau to clean data and a significant amount of time was dedicated to reformatting blank spaces in Excel, especially since some of our datasets were originally PDF files. 

Images and Sources

Travel.state.gov. Retrieved May 2, 2023, from https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/AnnualReports

Travel.state.gov. Retrieved May 2, 2023, from https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Non-Immigrant-Statistics/RefusalRates/

Basic Tourism Statistics. (2022, December 22). Www.unwto.org. https://www.unwto.org/tourism-statistics/key-tourism-statistics

Dataset Search. (n.d.). Datasetsearch.research.google.com. Retrieved May 2, 2023, from https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/search?src=0&query=visa%20rejections&docid=L2cvMTFybjJoNDZ3cA%3D%3D

Nonimmigrant Visa by Category – dataset by dos. (n.d.). Data.world. Retrieved May 2, 2023, from https://data.world/dos/nonimmigrant-visa-by-category

Statista. (2022). International tourist arrivals worldwide. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/209334/total-number-of-international-tourist-arrivals/

Total air traffic passengers traveling to/from the U.S. 2021. (n.d.). Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/193590/total-air-traffic-passengers-travelling-to-or-from-the-us/

(2023). Wikimedia.org. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/USA-wiza-anonymous.jpg