Just yesterday, Georgians found out about a fun new addition to the process of applying for US tourist/business visitor (B1/B2) visas: if we apply and are approved, we’ll now have to post a bond of at least $5k and possibly up to $15k in order to travel that will be paid back to us after we’ve returned. Not only that, but the best visa we can get under the scheme will be a three-month single entry one that only lets us stay for 30 days (before that, it was common for Georgians who got visas to get 10-year ones that would let them stay for 180 days—and of course, there was only an application fee of $150 or so and no bonds to speak of). The US says it’s a “pilot” that will only last until September, but something tells me the pilot may then be made permanent. OK, this country has lots of problems, and this isn’t the worst of them, but still. Really not great, whether you were planning to go for business or pleasure or (worse) you have relatives in the US whom you’ll now have real trouble seeing (grandma and grandpa coming together? Pony up $30k please).

Why did this happen?

Well, because

1. The US, not for the first and probably not for the last time in its history, is shifting to a very restrictive immigration policy;

2. Georgia does have a pretty high visa overstay rate;

3. Our government decided that it’s a good idea to attack, on almost a daily basis, the US in general and the US ambassadors here personally.

One ventures to say that if it were just (1) and (2), we wouldn’t get the treatment we got and that it was (3) that tipped the balance. Armenia, for instance, has about the same overstay rate that we do, and they are doing OK. But I don’t do geopolitics in this newsletter; I mostly do data. And because there’s data on #2, I wanted to look at it and see if it showed something interesting. And the brief version of what it shows is: Georgia does have a pretty high rate of overstays for the number of trips per 100k people that its citizens take (meaning, for the likelihood that the US gives its citizens a visa in the first place). But having high overstays at our level of issuance doesn’t guarantee you’ll get slammed with restrictions: for that, you’ve got to put in extra effort.

Now for the details.

The details

Every year, US Customs and Border Protection publishes on its website a report about what happened in the previous year as far as visa overstays are concerned. The latest one has the data for FY 2024 (that is, from October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024). The report shows overstay rates for around 150 countries that require visas to travel to the US—and if you look at that data, Georgia is in the upper third, at #46, with 7.2% overstays. Pretty high, but also far below leaders like Myanmar, Suriname, or Chad, with around 30% overstays.

These numbers, though, are a little misleading: they only show those who stayed in the US after they were supposed to leave—but in order to stay in the US illegally on a tourist visa, you have to first get to the US legally on that same visa. Which means that the US has to have issued you a visa in the first place. So a good adjustment to do is to look at the number of people from each country per 100k of its population who traveled to the US and then see how their overstay rates differ—on the assumption that there will be lots of countries the citizens of which can’t really even get a US visa because the US knows that they are so likely to overstay.

Therefore: let’s look at precisely that data (relying, for population, on data from the World Bank). And let’s split it into two charts: one that shows countries in Latin America and the Caribbean from which people, understandably, travel to the US a lot (more than 1,000 visits per 100k of population in 2024) and the other that shows countries (mostly elsewhere) that have fewer than 1,000 visits per 100k per year.

For the 1,000+ group, this is what the chart looks like, colored by B1/B2 visa issuance status (“no visas” means you are one of the countries for which the US, in effect, does not issue B1/B2 visas, and—in some cases—practically issues no visas at all).

You’ll see the Bahamas up there with a crazy 75k visitors per 100k population—do people fly to the US to buy their groceries? But never mind: let’s look at overstays. Most countries are below a 2.5% rate. Of these, Antigua still got slammed with no visas—poor Antigua, what did it do? And Grenada and Nicaragua got bonds. Then there is the 2.5-5% band, where Dominica got the no visas treatment. And then there is the 5%+, where it was Tonga—though Samoa and Suriname, far ahead of Tonga (Suriname especially, with its world-leading 31% overstay rate), are still getting visas as usual. Consistency, thy name is the present-day US Department of State. Or maybe there’s geopolitics involved that I don’t understand.

Let’s move to the other chart though: the one for <1,000/100k countries, which is where Georgia is.

You’ll see that below 70 visits/100k, it is true for a lot of countries’ citizens that if you can get in you will often overstay—you are like, to hell with it, I’m not going back to Chad or Myanmar (which the State Department insists on calling Burma). Fair enough. And it’s mostly these countries that get slammed with no visa issuance at all or with bonds: it was already very hard to get a US visa there, and now it’s even harder or impossible.

Above 70/100k, which is where we reside (250), the picture is mixed. There, the overstay rate is mostly <2.5%. Of those countries, Mauritius, Seychelles, Tunisia, and Nepal still got slammed with bonds: the first two probably for giving their passports too easily to anyone who pays, the latter two because—I don’t know. In the 2.5-5% territory, Mongolia and Fiji got bonds, too. Don’t ask me why. And then above 5%, Venezuela, Cuba, and Haiti got the no visas treatment (for understandable reasons—politics for Venezuela and Cuba, very high overstays for Haiti), and Cabo Verde, Tuvalu, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Botswana got bonds. Bolivia, Jordan, Armenia, and Ghana didn’t get bonds though, even though their overstay rates aren’t much below ours or even are higher (5.4%, 5.8%, 6.2%, and 7.8%, respectively, to our 7.2%).

So basically: if you exclude the tiny island states, there are only four countries with 70-1,000 visitors/100k/year that got hit with bonds: Mongolia, Botswana, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia (and there are Grenada and Nicaragua with >1,000). As I’ve said, I don’t know what Mongolia did or did not do. Same for Botswana. I don’t know about Grenada and Nicaragua, either. Kyrgyzstan is probably getting a little too cozy with Russia. And in the case of Georgia, the moral of the story seems to be: if you already have high visa overstay rates, and if 12% of your GDP are remittances directly linked to those overstay rates,1 maybe don’t attack the US and its ambassadors.

PS: After I published this post, I realized I also want to look at how Georgia’s visit and overstay rates changed through the years. Here’s the chart with the available data, excluding 2021 (not available) and 2022 (available, but anomalous). We’ve been trending towards higher visit rates and lower overstay ones. Well, we shall now get extremely low rates for both.