Islamabad: Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics team has produced a report based on the US Visa Issuance Dashboard it has built from publicly available data on who gets Visas for the US. The dashboard can be accessed here: https://galluppakistandigitalanalytics.com/us-visa-issuance-statistics-dashboard/
The overall finding from the report? Indians apply for a non-immigrant visa at roughly 2x the per-capita rate of Pakistan and Bangladesh - then get approved at nearly double their rate on top of that.
The State Department publishes adjusted refusal rates by nationality every fiscal year. Refusal rate equals refused divided by applied, so applications can be estimated as issued divided by (1 - refusal rate). We matched FY2024 and FY2025 refusal rates against same-year visa issuance for India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and normalized everything per capita. This provided us with data on Visa Applications from each country. Since the three countries have vastly different population sizes, we then computed per capita numbers for comparison.
Visa Applications per 100,000 for US non-immigrant visa in 2025:
The results for per capita visa applications are as below:
Applications per 100,000 (2025): India 95 | Pakistan 41 | Bangladesh 40
Visas issued per 100,000 population in 2025:
India 74, Pakistan 20, Bangladesh 15. Applications per 100,000 in 2025: India 95, Pakistan 41, Bangladesh 40.
India's advantage over Pakistan drops from 3.77x (issued) to 2.30x (applications).
Over Bangladesh, 4.86x becomes 2.40x.
Roughly half of India's apparent edge was a refusal-rate effect, not an application-rate gap - Indians apply at about 2x the rate of their neighbors, then get approved at a much higher rate on top of that (78% vs. 48% for Pakistan, 39% for Bangladesh).
Year-over-year Visa Access and Issuance:
All three countries saw issuance collapse from FY2024 to FY2025 - India -48%, Pakistan -67%, Bangladesh -68% - hitting Pakistan and Bangladesh's per-capita application rates far harder (-63% and -55%) than India's (-44%), while Bangladesh's refusal rate alone jumped 15 points.
So why the underlying application-rate gap in the first place? A few hypotheses, none provable from visa statistics alone but all plausible:
Economic integration - India's IT/services sector has spent 25+ years building direct U.S. business pipelines (H-1B pathways, global capability centers), generating the kind of well-documented, easy-to-approve travel that Pakistan and Bangladesh's export economies don't match.
Ability to self-fund and document - B1/B2 approval requires showing financial capacity and ties back home. A larger affluent/upper-middle class in absolute numbers likely helps, though probably doesn't explain a 2x gap alone.
Process friction and familiarity - consular post density, documentation ecosystems, and referral networks from prior successful applicants can lower friction for the next person, in ways that don't show up in refusal-rate statistics.
Why are we studying this?
A population that can move, work, and study in the U.S. more easily has a structural advantage that compounds across generations.