How to scrape immigration and visa data from Visa Journey using the Minexa API
- Minexa.ai
- 13 hours ago
- 2 min read
Immigration research involves tracking hundreds of forum threads across country-specific portals, and doing that manually does not scale. This walkthrough shows how to extract structured data from Visa Journey (visajourney.com) using the Minexa API, covering every step from scraper creation to a production-ready Python script.
Step 1: Open the target page
Navigate to the Visa Journey country portal, for example the Brazil-specific thread listing at visajourney.com/portals/index.php?country=Brazil. This page lists forum threads as structured rows, each containing a title, author, timestamp, reply count, and view count.
Step 2: Confirm you are on the right page
Open the Minexa Chrome extension. The popup shows an 'I'm on the right page' button. Click it to signal that the current URL is the page you want to train the scraper on.
After confirming, Minexa checks for pagination. The extension shows which next-page control it detected. Click Continue to proceed.
Step 3: Choose list mode and start the scraper
Select 'List' mode since each thread row shares the same structure. Then choose 'Advanced scenarios' and click the start button. Minexa automatically highlights the HTML container it believes holds the full thread list.
Step 4: Review extracted columns
After clicking 'Create Scraper', Minexa identifies all data points within the container. You can browse them using the next/prev navigation. Fields include forum_post_title, forum_topic_link, username, post_timestamp, reply_count, views_count, and long_text_form_filing among others.
The forum_topic_link field returns a direct absolute URL per thread, enabling programmatic deep-linking without any secondary navigation. The long_text_form_filing field returns a structured array of objects, one per paragraph, letting you reconstruct the full post body reliably downstream.
Step 5: Get the API request code
Click 'API Request' in the top right. Select a scraping config from the dropdown. For Visa Journey, start with 'Scrape + Extract - service3'. Copy the generated Python code directly into your IDE.
The request body targets the https://api.minexa.ai/data/ endpoint. Pass your scraper_id, set columns to ["top_30"] to return the top-ranked fields, and supply your list of Visa Journey country portal URLs.
Sample extracted data
[
{
"forum_post_title": "N-600K - Eligibility",
"forum_topic_link": "https://www.visajourney.com/forums/topic/836520-n-600k-eligibility/",
"username": "haljbr",
"post_timestamp": "1:47 pm - Jun 13, 2026",
"reply_count": "7 replies",
"views_count": "375 views"
},
{
"forum_post_title": "Missing Info on I-751 Receipt Notice",
"forum_topic_link": "https://www.visajourney.com/forums/topic/836165-missing-info-on-i-751-receipt-notice/",
"username": "Terdals",
"post_timestamp": "10:38 pm - Apr 24, 2026",
"reply_count": "2 replies",
"views_count": "663 views"
}
]The reply_count and views_count fields give you engagement signals per thread without visiting each page individually. Combined with post_timestamp, they let you filter for active or high-traffic threads in a single pass.
Once the job finishes, export to Excel or JSON directly from the results table. To scale across multiple country portals, pass each country URL into the urls array using the same scraper_id. No retraining needed as long as the page structure stays consistent.
For a related walkthrough on extracting structured data from another jobs-style listing source, see How to scrape jobs data from Apna using the Minexa.ai API.
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