U.S. Consulates in India Overwhelmed as H-1B Visa Chaos Explodes – Thousands of Interviews Canceled

New Delhi/Washington – December 10, 2025

In a move that has blindsided tens of thousands of foreign workers, U.S. embassies and consulates in India have abruptly postponed or outright canceled H-1B visa stamping interviews scheduled for the coming weeks. The sudden backlog stems from a new State Department policy, effective December 15, that mandates publicly accessible social-media accounts for an “expanded security review” of every applicant. The rule has slashed daily interview slots at high-volume posts in Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and New Delhi by as much as 70–80% almost overnight.

For the roughly 250,000–300,000 Indian nationals who dominate the H-1B program (over 70% of all approvals in recent years), the timing could not be worse. Most are required to leave the United States and get a fresh visa stamp in their passport whenever they renew their status or change employers. With holiday travel already booked and 60-day grace periods ticking, many now face the nightmare prospect of being stuck outside the U.S. for four to eight months – or longer.

Immigration lawyers report panic among clients. “People are canceling flights, postponing weddings, and scrambling to figure out if they can even keep their jobs,” one California-based attorney told reporters.

The Bigger Picture Everyone Is Whispering About

While the official reason is “enhanced vetting,” critics and industry insiders are pointing to a far more uncomfortable truth: the H-1B program, particularly the Indian segment, has been riddled for years with what many openly call outright fraud and abuse.

• Bodyshops and consultancies headquartered in India or run by Indian nationals in the U.S. flood the lottery with multiple entries for the same low-skilled workers.
• Fake résumés, fabricated experience letters, and pay-to-play schemes have become so common that USCIS itself has flagged thousands of suspicious petitions every year.
• Workers earning $15–$25 an hour on the bench in the U.S. while the consulting firm bills clients $100+ are the norm rather than the exception.
• The infamous “Indian IT outsourcing scam model” – derisively compared to Indian scam call centers operating on American soil – has turned a skilled-worker program into what detractors call a low-wage labor pipeline.

Former USCIS officials and whistleblowers have testified for years that certain India-based staffing giants and their American shells submit tens of thousands of applications annually, gaming the cap through duplication and falsified job offers. When random audits finally started catching some of the worst offenders, approval rates for Indian applicants plummeted from 90%+ to below 30% in certain categories.

The new social-media transparency rule appears to be the State Department’s blunt-instrument response: if petitioners and beneficiaries won’t voluntarily clean up the massive fraud coming primarily from India, consular officers will now dig through public Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn posts to spot red flags – dramatically slowing down an already strained system.

What Happens Next?

• Applicants are being told to “monitor their email” for new interview dates that may not come until mid-2026.
• A limited “visa revalidation” pilot inside the U.S. exists, but it is currently restricted to a tiny fraction of cases and excludes most first-time stampers.
• Major tech companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) are quietly telling affected employees to work remotely from India or Canada for months – a privilege smaller consultancies and their workers simply don’t have.

For now, the world’s most famous skilled-worker visa program – one overwhelmingly used by Indian nationals – is effectively on life support, choked by a toxic mix of long-ignored fraud, bureaucratic panic, and policy whiplash.

As one Hyderabad-based applicant put it: “They let the scam run unchecked for fifteen years. Now honest people pay the price while the real fraudsters just open new shell companies.”