From 2021, Americans will need a visa for Europe. You read it here first! That means you'll need a visa to visit NXP, Arm, Bosch, Nokia, BMW, Infineon, ST Microelectronics, and many more companies in our industry.

When I lived in France, there was some major political event (an election? a terrorist bombing? I forget). I was asked by a Frenchman, "What do Americans think about the situation in France?" and seemed a bit disappointed when I told him that Americans didn't think about France at all, and probably many of them couldn't even place it on a map. That reminded me of a famous Winston Churchill quote that I like:

When you’re 20 you care what everyone thinks,
When you’re 40 you stop caring what everyone thinks,
When you’re 60 you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place.

I don't know if Churchill actually said it. Like Mark Twain and Yogi Berra, lots gets attributed to them erroneously. In fact, Yogi Berra put it best:

I didn't say all the things I said.

Probably including that one.

Anyway, as an American not thinking about Europe much at all, you probably have never heard of Schengen.

Schengen

What or where is Schengen? Wikipedia describes it as:

Schengen is a small wine-making town and commune in far south-eastern Luxembourg, on the western bank of the river Moselle.

But in 1985, in Shengen, a European agreement was signed that removed most internal frontiers in Europe over a period of time. Some countries, such as Britain, didn't join. Not having a land frontier, Britain only has what in the security world we call "perimeter defense." Once you are in the country, unlike most countries in Europe, you don't have to carry your identity card at all times. Well, mostly because Britain doesn't have identity cards. Even driving licenses had no photograph until the late 1990s, and they only included your birthdate in a sort of encoded way that you read out of the serial number if you know the decoding scheme. So being carded in Britain when I lived there was:

Bartender: Are you over eighteen?
Teenager: Yes
Bartender: (pours beer)

Schengen also included several states that are not in the EU, but became part of the frontier-free area: Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, and Liechtenstein, along with microstates like Vatican City and Monaco. So Schengen is in blue and purple in the picture. The light blue states (UK, Cyprus, etc) are in the EU but not in Schengen.

After Shengen removed the internal frontiers, anyone could go from, say, France to Italy without stopping for immigration or customs checks (actually, customs checks got removed a lot earlier, since the EU is a free-trade zone). But that meant that any foreigner visiting could go from France to Italy, too, so it made no sense to have a French visa and an Italian visa. This also meant harmonizing visa policies. If the French wanted to make it easy for visitors from Francophone Africa to visit, but Italy didn't, then getting to Italy just required going via France first, so Schengen had to have uniform requirements.

Now visas are for the Schengen area, not individual countries. It also required a major redesign of airports since Schengen flights were basically domestic flights, but true international flights to the US (or UK and other non-Schengen countries) required clearing immigration. In Brussels airport, pre-Schengen, you used to clear immigration before checking in, since there were only international flights.

There is no centralized Schengen visa operation. You apply for the visa from the first country you will visit. But then you're done. You can go to other countries, by plane, driving, or even walking across the border (a bit off-topic, but I have walked from US in Alaska to Canada, with no checks at all at the top of the Chilkoot Pass...see picture of the border...we got a narrow-gauge train back into the US, also with no immigration checks).

US citizens, and those from many other countries, have been able to visit visa-free for years. So why the change now? It's not because Trump is president, Europe is not building a wall. It is because the US is insisting on visas for some European countries, and as is usually the case between countries, they reciprocate. I have written before about how on my first trip to Japan I didn't need a visa but all the Americans with me did, the reason being that the UK didn't require visas for Japanese but in that era, all visitors to the US required going to the US consulate and getting a visa. Citizens of some countries, like China, still need a Schengen visa to visit Europe. That's one below.

Most European nations no longer need a visa before traveling to the USA. The exceptions are Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland, Romania, and Cyprus. The US insists that people from those countries get a visa before traveling. The EU insists that all European countries are treated the same. The US has refused to back down and so the EU will institute visas for the whole Schengen area for all Americans, since there is no way to reciprocate by only requiring a visa for those five countries. That would be like requiring a visa for Texas, but not the rest of the US, even though there is free movement between states.

Of course, it is also because there is a lot more leverage for Europe insisting on visas for countries like France, Greece, and Italy where tourists typically go. Not many Americans go to the five states requiring US visas, although Game of Thrones has put Croatia on some people's bucket lists. As it happens, the group of us that goes hiking every summer has been to Bulgaria, Romania, and Cyprus in the last few years. And we plan on Poland this summer. I've sort of been to Croatia since I've been to Zagreb, but it was still Yugoslavia, and I only went to the train station on my way to Greece from Munich.

How Will It Work?

You can read full details at ETIAS Visas for Americans. ETIAS stands for European Travel Information and Authorization System. You will apply online, no need to visit any consulates, and it will be valid for three years. There is a fee, but it looks like it is only €7.

This is similar to the system that visitors from most countries use to visit the US. It has gone from having to go to the consulate and get a real visa stamped in your passport, to filling in a green I-92 form on the plane, to being electronic.

Of course, if you hold both a European and a US passport, like me, then I think you are exempt. Britain is not a member of Schengen, but it still has visa-free travel to the rest of Europe. So far the only advantage of holding two passports has been shorter European lines when arriving in Europe from the US, and being able to simply put my passport on the reader and have the gate open once it's decided I look like the photo encoded in the biometric RFID chip in my UK passport.

Mobile Pass

By the way, another PSA. If you are a US citizen traveling overseas, I recommend downloading the US immigration App called Mobile Pass. If you travel a lot you can invest the money and effort in getting Global Entry. But Mobile Pass is just as fast. You don't fill in any paperwork, you do it all on your phone while you are waiting to get off the plane. Then you go through a special Mobile Entry lane, they scan the barcode, and you're done. They don't usually even bother to stamp your passport. Sometimes you have to scan it at customs, too, or sometimes they just glance at your phone, see you have Mobile Entry, and wave you past.

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.