Because there is a statutory requirement that applicants who require an interview appear personally before a consular officer. So far, the State Department has interpreted this to mean "standing physically in front of".

Having done tens of thousands of visa interviews, I do think the requirement of a physical appearance before an officer is important. I could quickly review a person's travel history by looking through their passports, questioning them about prior trips. A person's travel patterns and visas to other countries can tell you a lot. I could quickly use a UV light or magnifier on educational documents to see if they were genuine. Several times, I overhead conversations from other applicants and officers that were relevant to my applicant (same employer/group) and I would consult with them. There are many other details you notice when doing this in person thousands of times.

There are also practical matters - if you're trying to do this via video link, how to you authenticate the person on the other end? At the consulate, we fingerprint them and compare them to previously collected biometrics. If you offload this authentication to a contractor site in the US, but I'm in India, is this site open in the middle of the night?

In cases where the applicant qualifies for a waiver of the interview, the State Department actually does (or at least did when I was there) have a substantial program whereby visa applications are largely processed remotely. An applicant would have no hint as to whether or not that happened, though.

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maxerickson 2 days ago | parent [-]

Is there a statutory requirement that the consular officer that conducts the interview make a decision without input from other people?

Like it seems hilariously backwards in your example that the cheaters were able to make an end run around the system you praise, when it would be easy to have someone local taking a look at global applications. Or just applications that someone thought were odd.

	▲	viceconsole 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		99% or more of the visa applicants we interviewed in India were Indian. We interviewed them in India so that we had access to local staff who spoke all major Indian languages, a fraud unit well-versed in authenticating local documents, and connections to local authorities for more complex cases. Nothing is "easy" when you have a line of hundreds of people who have been waiting months or over a year for their appointment and you have 120 seconds to deal with them in a fair and respectful way (which unfortunately does NOT always happen), while you also have personal job repercussions if you fail to properly vet their application and miss an important national security related detail. As it turned out, we flagged enough of those cases as a patern for further review that did result in us consulting with our staff in the third country and discovering the issue. Also, visas that are issued can be revoked, or flagged for further scrutiny by CPB if necessary.