H-1B visa holder wakes up at 3.30 am to book appointment for August 2027, US professional surprised

A US policy professional expressed shock and surprise that how little people are talking about the H-1B visa situation in India — how difficult it is to re-enter the US once you are out of it and your visa stamping is expired. Sam Peak, a policy manager of Economic Innovation Group, said he received a text from somebody on an H-1B status who had to wake up at 3.30 am to book a consular appointment for August 2027. Peak said this issue remains under-discussed while there is a lot of talks on H-1B weighted lottery, wage levels, Project Firewall to stop H-1B frauds etc.At a very basic level, the White House made re-entering the US very tough, Peak observed.“Wait times at the Indian consular offices are usually ridiculous, but visa holders could circumvent these backlogs by going to US embassies with less bureaucratic strain (like Canada) to renew their visas. The White House ended this practice last year. Now, if an Indian H-1B needs to travel for work or they have a family emergency in their home country, they won’t be able to seamlessly depart and return,” Peak added.A major stalemate situation arose in December 2025 when consular offices in India rescheduled all H-1B, H-4 visa appointments and deferred them to the middle of 2026. All dates were pushed behind and no new slots opened in India in the last six months. Now reports are surfacing that some dates are opening up randomly in June, July this year while until a few months ago, the situation was that there was no slot availability in India until 2027.The mass rescheduling of the dates was triggered by the new policy of social media vetting of the visa holders for which the consular offices reduced the number of appointments per day. As hundreds of H-1B visa holders got stuck in India for indefinite time, their employers were in a fix with a few allowing them to work from India.