Americans will need a visa to visit Europe in 2024. Meanwhile, Europeans who have been to Cuba are discovering they can't come to the U.S., because terrorism.
Once
upon a time, citizens of the United States could travel to almost every country
in the European Union for 90 days without asking any government for permission
beyond showing a passport at the initial point of entry. It was—and still is,
for a few waning months—a marvelous if underacknowledged achievement for
liberty.
Alas,
the days of frictionless travel will soon be a memory. Starting at a
so-far-unspecified date in early 2024, Americans and residents of 62 other
countries that currently enjoy visa-free visitation to the Schengen Area of the
E.U. will need to pay a fee and submit an online application (including
biometric information, work experience, medical conditions, and initial
itinerary), then pass a criminal/security background check, before enjoying
that croissant in gay Paree. The grimly named European Travel Information and
Authorisation System (ETIAS) is projected to cost 7 euros per application and
take up to 14 days to render a decision.
Before
you start shaking your fist at freedom-hating Eurocrats, know that ETIAS is the
belated continental answer to a system the U.S. has imposed on residents of
friendly countries since 2009, called the Electronic System for Travel
Authorization, or ESTA. Like ETIAS, ESTA is a response to 21st-century
terrorist attacks and combines modest fees ($21) with less-than-instantaneous turnaround
times (a promised 72 hours). Both either tweak or torpedo (depending on your
point of view) the notion of reciprocal "visa waiver" travel between
high-trust countries.
U.S.
passports have long been given the red carpet treatment worldwide, due to the
country's economic heft and traditional leadership role in negotiating down
international barriers to the movement of people (and goods). That latter ethic
began to deteriorate after the Cold War, with the rise of bipartisan
anti-illegal immigration politics in the early 1990s, and then in earnest after
Saudi nationals pulverized the World Trade Center with highjacked planes on
September 11, 2001.
The
Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 mandated that
travelers from Visa Waiver countries (which now number 40) submit an
application using a machine-readable passport, volunteer plenty of personal
information, and answer correctly a series of potentially disqualifying
questions. As some of us mentioned at the time, "Whatever we impose on the
world, the world will get around to imposing on us."
We have
since imposed still more restrictions, which many Europeans are discovering
this summer to their chagrin. First was the 2015 exclusion (backed by several
libertarian-leaning legislators) of dual nationals of both an existing Visa
Waiver country and of either Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria, as well as anyone
(aside from those in selected professions) who had visited any of those
countries since 2011. Then in 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
added Libya, Somalia, and Yemen to the list.
Having
been thus teed up by the administration of Barack Obama, President Donald Trump
in his first days in office singled out those exact seven countries for a
travel and refugee ban. And he was not done. All it takes is an official (if
political and arbitrary) U.S. government designation of being a state sponsor
of terrorism for a country to be declared retroactively off-limits for
prospective visa-free visitors to America.
So,
beginning in 2019, citizens of Visa Waiver countries who had visited North
Korea since 2011 were no longer eligible for Visa Waiver treatment. Then in
August 2022 (based on a late Trump administration decision), Cuba was added to
the don't-go-there list retroactive to 2021; the ESTA application system was
updated with a Cuba-travel question just this month.
What to
Europeans seemed like a routine questionnaire administered mostly by airline
companies has now produced the shocking outcome that they have to spend $160
and wait many, many months to maybe (or maybe not!) obtain permission to travel
into the United States. More than 300,000 Europeans from Spain, Germany, the
United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Portugal alone visited Cuba in 2022,
according to the Cuban government.
So,
because of 9/11, and the 2014 terrorist attacks worldwide, and the partisan
seesawing of policy toward communist Cuba, peaceful Europeans who want to spend
money in the United States are being thwarted in the name of fighting
terrorism. It is a foolish policy that will definitely make America poorer
while having a marginal (if any) impact on safety.
Could
the E.U. retaliate in some way, exempting more U.S. passport holders from the
already modified Visa Waiver system? On the one hand, visa policies are
definitionally reciprocal; on the other, Washington has more heft and can move
with much more bureaucratic speed than Brussels. The most likely targets for
any future retribution would be Americans holding dual citizenship in
disfavored countries, or perhaps even those who have traveled to countries that
Eurocrats have deemed beyond the pale. Always remember that it happened here
first.
Governments
love having humans maximally searchable on databases, using digitized
identification. For a long time, it was cranky Americans, with their stubborn
notions of privacy and liberty—the right to move through life without showing
papers to people with guns—who led the resistance against being answerable, of
having to ask officials for permission. Now it's us pushing the rest of the
"free world" toward having global biometric and banking information just
a single government click away. Shame, that.
https://reason.com/2023/07/28/say-goodbye-to-permissionless-travel/