“The EU/Schengen has open borders” — told to me for years and years and still while I have been repeatedly coming across border controls on ground and flight trips within the Schengen area during the last several years too.

Many of my acquaintances in EU national government offices that used to fancy the “open borders” are no longer all that thrilled about “open borders” in the Schengen area. I think the pandemic has shown us that there really are national cultural limits to commitment to “open borders”.

These countries which continue to want national blacklists of their own to enforce on even close partner states’ citizens are not truly committed to what I would consider to be open borders.