The United States Mission in Nigeria, has cleared the air on the new $15,000 Visa Bond introduced by the Trump Administration, on some intended travellers going to the States. The Mission in a move to allay the fears of millions of Nigerian travellers, said the new Visa bond policy doe not include Nigeria.
The United Mission in a statement released on Tuesday 24th November 2020, on their official Twitter handle, while addressing the Visa bond program, said the move by the President Trump’s administration was to address the root causes of Visa overstays, but the six months pilot program, does not include Nigeria. The statement said:
“In response to the April 2019 Presidential Memorandum on Combating High Nonimmigrant Overstay Rates, the Department and our embassies and consulates overseas conducted an in-depth analysis to identify and address root causes of overstays.
Among other efforts to address this challenge, the State Department is considering additional steps to address overstays, including piloting a limited visa bonds program to test, in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the operational feasibility of posting, processing, and discharging visa bonds as means to ensure the timely departure from the United States of certain travellers.
Accordingly, the State Department will begin a limited six-month visa bond pilot program beginning on December 24, 2020. We are committed to combating visa overstays and making sure travellers to the United States respect our laws.
The implementation of this pilot builds on our engagement with foreign governments in recent years and will ensure continued progress to reduce overstay rates. Nigeria is not included in this six months pilot program,” the statement added.
The visa bond rule will allow U.S. consular officers to require tourist and business African travellers from countries whose nationals had an “overstay rate” of 10% or higher in 2019 to pay a refundable bond of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000.
The Visa bond pilot project takes effect Dec. 24 and runs through June 24. It targets countries whose nationals have higher rates of overstaying B-2 visas for tourists and B-1 visas for business travellers.
The Trump administration said the six-month pilot program aims to test the feasibility of collecting such bonds and will serve as a diplomatic deterrence to overstaying the visas.
Twenty-four countries meet those criteria, including 15 African countries. While those nations had higher rates of overstays, they sent relatively few African travellers to the United States.
Countries whose tourist and business travellers could be subject to the Visa bond requirement include those from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sudan, Chad, Angola, Burundi, Djibouti and Eritrea. Other countries include Afghanistan, Bhutan, Iran, Syria, Laos and Yemen.