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 prearrangements 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 questionning on arrival in Europe and, starting next year, a de facto visa by another name that they will have to apply and pay for and have approved before they can board a flight (or international ferry or train) to any European destination.

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 in, 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, some 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 menbers 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, this will be 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. (This is 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.)
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 transmited 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.

The big change was when ETAs applied for and issued (or denied) in advance replaced entry permits issued on arrival, rather than when they replaced visas stamped in passports. That change was made first by the USA, which replaced entry permits on arrival for citizens of the most-favored-nations in the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) with an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) approval which has to be obtained in advance.

The ESTA scheme was proposed by the US government in 2008 and made mandatory later that same year. With ESTA approval amounting to a form of e-visa, ESTA effectively eliminated truly visa-free travel to the US for anyone, regardless of citizenship.

Like the US ESTA fee, the Schengen ETIAS fee is relatively small, but will be payable only by credit or debit card or direct debit from a bank account, not with cash. This insures that the traveler profile and travel history can also be linked to financial and other data through the card or bank account number — a problem we noted years ago with respect to ESTA.

(It might be possible to pay the fee for a US ESTA or a Schengen ETIAS with a prepaid debit card purchased for cash, but these cards don’t always work, due to restrictions on international transactions and validation of international addresses. If you’ve tried to pay the fee for a US ESTA with a prepaid debit card puchased for cash, please let us know how it went. We won’t be able to test this with ETIAS fees until the ETIAS system is operational.)

In implementing the ETIAS e-visa requirement, the EU is taking a page from the anti-asylum playbook implemented by the US fifteen years earlier — for the same reasons.

Every country including the US and the members of the EU reserves the right to deny anyone admission on arrival — subject only to restrictions imposed by international refugee and asylum law — even if they have a valid visa or e-visa.

Imposing an e-visa requirement like the US ESTA or the EU ETIAS doesn’t necessarily reflect any change in who is admitted or refused entry to the country. The difference is whether people are refused entry on arrival or refused permission to travel in advance, and on that basis prevented from traveling to the country.

That might not seem significant, or it might seem better to be told you won’t be admitted before you have made plans and spent money to travel to a country, only to be turned around and put on the next plane (at your own expense) back to where you came from.

But for asylum seekers, reaching the country is all-important. Once you step across the border or reach a port of entry, you are entitled to apply for asylum, regardless of whether you have a visa or permission or papers or are otherwise deemed inadmissible. Asylum requires traveling to a border, and that’s equally true for aylum in the US or in the EU.

The sole reason to switch from making decisions on admissibility on arrival at a border or airport to requiring a visa, e-visa, or other form of advance permission to travel to the border is to frustrate asylum seekers by keeping them from reaching a place where they can make a claim for asylum. These “travel authorization” schemes are a deliberate frontal assault on the right to asylum.

Denial of authorization to travel to the country amounts to denial of asylum, but isn’t recorded as an asylum denial or made in accordance with asylum law, which only applies once an asylum seekers reaches a country of potential refuge. It displaces these de facto asylum denial decisions away from the country and its borders, keeping them out of sight and largely out of mind for citizens of the US or the EU.

If you don’t like it that, as a US citizen, you are inconvenienced by these measures being taken by the EU, in emulation of the US, to prevent refugees from applying for asylum, one good place to start is to work to get the US to respect the rights of asylum seekers, includng the right to leave other countries and the right to travel to the US border or port of entry, by common carrier or otherwise.

The third major travel surveillance scheme in the pipeline, further in the future but already under negotiation, is an Enhanced Border Security Partnership (EBSP) agreement that would give the US government access to the EES biometric database about visitors to the EU (including US citizens), and possibly give EU member governments fully or partially reciprocal access to US biometric databases about foreign visitors to the US.

This change is even more clearly and directly being driven by the US, not the EU. Questions about the proposed EBSP agreement have been raised by EU digital rights activists, by Members of European Parliament (question 1, answer 1, question 2, answer 2), and by some EU member states. But the US-EU negotiations underway since at least 2023 are moving ahead, driven by an explicit threat by the US to require an EBSP agreement with each country in the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP).

Citizens of countries in the VWP can visit the US for tourism or many business purposes with only an ESTA, with only a $21 application fee. Citizens of non-VWP countries — all other countries — can only enter the US, even as tourists or to change planes in transit between other countries, with full US visas that cost a minimum of $185 and require an in-person interview at a US embassy or consulate, among other prerequisites. This huge difference in US treatment of VWP and non-VWP citizens gives the US huge leverage in extorting all manner of concessions from foreign governments that want to be in the VWP.

If, as a US citizen, you’ve never had to pay that much for a visa, let that be a reminder that, as Edward Hasbrouck of the Identity Project wrote in The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World, “US citizens are the world’s greatest beneficiaries of nonreciprocal visa-free entry requirments and fees… If you’re a US citizen and you want to be treated better by foreign governments [when you travel abroad], lobby our own government to treat foreign visitors and would-be visitors to the US better.”

It’s appropriate to criticize the EU for following the bad example of the US in restricting the right to fredom of movement and access to aylum. But if we are going to do so, we should  also call out the US for setting this bad prcedent and pressuring the EU to emulate it.