By Edward Hasbrouck | Source

Citizens of the USA and some other most-favored nations have long been able to travel to many European countries for tourism or business without visas or pre-arrangements and with minimal border formalities, as long as they didn’t stay too long or seek local residence or employment.

This is scheduled to change with the imposition of new controls on foreigners — including US citizens — visiting Europe starting in November 2024. This is to be followed by a further ratcheting up of control and surveillance of  foreign travelers to Europe scheduled for some time in 2025.

Some US citizens are likely to be shocked and humiliated — as any traveler anywhere in the world should be, regardless of their citizenship — to be subjected to fingerprinting and mug shots and additional questioning on arrival in Europe and, starting next year, a de facto visa by another name that they will have to apply, pay for, and have approved in advance.

European citizens can and should object to the imposition by their governments of these new restrictions on foreigners, including foreign tourists and business visitors and foreign citizens who reside in Europe. Europe could, and should, set a better example of respect for freedom of movement as a human right that shouldn’t depend on citizenship.

But US citizens who object to these new European measures should direct their objections and, more importantly, their agitation for changes in travel rules to the US government.

These impending new European travel control and surveillance measures are modeled on systems developed, already in use in, and actively promoted to European and other governments around the world by the US government.

By its precedents and international pressure, the US government is making travel more difficult for everyone, including US citizens, everywhere in the world including in Europe.

Three new control and surveillance schemes targeting visitors to Europe, soem of them in the works for years, are moving toward effective dates as early as November 2024.

Barring further delays, the Schengen Entry/Exit System EES) is scheduled to launch on November 10, 2024, according to an announcement on August 16th by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, in a speech to the staff of the eu-LISA agency that will operate the EES systems for recording travelers biometric data (mug shots and fingerprints) and logging their movements in and out of the Schengen zone.

What it means to say that this is a “European” system is a bit confusing. The EES was developed, funded, and managed by the European Union (EU), but it will be used at all of the external borders of the “Schengen zone”, which includes most but not all EU members as well as some other more or less nearby countries. The general idea of the Schengen Treaty is to increase and standardize the control of movement by foreigners in and out of the Schengen zone, while removing controls on movement within that zone.

EU members Ireland and Cyprus, which have special rules for crossing their disputed land borders with non-EU neighbors, are not part of the Schengen zone. As of March 2024 Schengen rules apply to those entering or leaving Bulgaria or Romania by air or sea, but not yet by land. All other EU members are full Schengen zone members. Several non-EU but allied countries have chosen, and have been permitted, to join the Schengen zone. Perhaps the most notable non-EU Schengen member is neutral Switzerland, which in the past has zealously guarded its sovereign autonomy in matters including border controls.

For citizens of non-EU, non-Schengen countries, including the US, EES will mean (1) being fingerprinted and photographed the first time you enter the Schengen zone (in most cases, if everything works as planned, at a “self-service” kiosk — as though surveillance should be considered a “service” to those being surveilled) (2) having to submit new fingerprints and mug shots every three years (so that automated facial recognition systems with access to the EES biometric database will have access to sufficiently up-to-date images to recognize all foreigners), and (3) having each entry to, or exit from, the Schengen zone logged by date, time, location, and, if you enter or exit by air, a link to the complete mirror copy of your airline reservation transmitted by the airline or reservation hosting system and retained in the EU system of linked government databases of PNR copies.  This PNR-based EU travel surveillance scheme is modeled on the one first implemented in the US sometime before 2006, and which the US has been working to globalize.

EES won’t, in and of itself, involve any new controls on who is or isn’t allowed to enter or leave the Schengen area, as long as you are willing to submit to fingerprinting and mug shots. (If you refuse, you won’t be admitted.) EES is purely an enabling mechanism for government tracking of individuals’ movements, including through the use of automated facial recognition at locations other than airports and borders.

US citizens who don’t like this should be aware that the US first proposed fingerprinting and photographing all foreign visitors — even those who aren’t required to obtain visas — in 2006 as part of the US-VISIT program, and was scanning all visitors’ fingerprints by 2009. European countries are emulating with EES what the US started doing fifteen years ago.

There’s been substantial pushback, even from some members of Congress, to US proposals — beginning as early as 2017 — to require US citizens entering and leaving our own country to submit to fingerprinting and mug shots. But there’s been much less complaint by Americans about US treatment of foreign visitors — leading the EU to feel free to reciprocate by imposing similar requirements on US and other non-European visitors.

The next stage of surveillance and control of visitors to Europe will be the imposition, beginning sometime in mid-2025 (barring further postponements), of  a requirement for “visa-free” visitors to obtain an ETIAS travel authorisation before they board a flight, ferry, train, or bus or cross a border on foot or by private vehicle into the Schengen zone.

An ETIAS or electronic travel authorization, by any name, is essentially an electronic visa. Calling it an “travel authorization” rather than an e-visa is sophistry intended solely to make it sound less burdensome and to allow governments to maintain a diplomatic fiction that “visa-free” entry by one country’s citizens to another country is still possible. If you have to apply for a “travel authorization” from your destination country’s government in advance of your departure for that country, I think it should be called an e-visa.

The concept of an ETA was pioneered by Australia, but there it was really only a shift from visas stamped in passports to a form of e-visa. Almost all foreign visitors,  including short-stay US citizen tourists, had been required for many years to obtain visas before they arrived in Australia. The switch from visas stamped in passports to ETAs actually simplified the application process, since applicants no longer needed to go to an Australian embassy or consulate to apply for a visa or to get it stamped in their passport once approved.