BigFlyer

Most of the press about the new EU rules for entry has gotten it wrong.

US citizens are not barred. Non-EU citizens residing in the US are barred.

Canadian citizens are not allowed by virtue of their citizenship. People residing in Canada are allowed entry to Schengen.

So a Canadian residing in the US cannot enter Schengen. A US citizen residing in Canada can enter Schengen.

An EU (or UK for now) citizen residing anywhere can enter Schengen.

It is difficult to imagine that the airline personnel at the various airports around the world are going to know who to allow to board and who do deny - they are accustomed to making boarding decisions based upon passports, not place of residence. So will they now be asking for drivers' licenses or secondary ID that shows place of residence?

Source for info on new EU rules: ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/health/coronavirus-response/travel-and-transportation-during-coronavirus-pandemic/travel-and-eu-during-pandemic_en

GUWonder

Residency permits/visas/cards and/or passports issued by governments are the presented docs and used in much the same way as usual by the airlines in the US and UK: by using TIMATIC.

If they don’t recognize a presented residency document type or doubt the authenticity of what is presented as being an accepted residency permit/visa/card/passport, then that is a problem — but not necessarily an insurmountable one as you can try to have them use a Google search or try to have them deal with the foreign government’s officials more directly on residency-right-related document issues.

A Canadian residing in the US is admissible into the Schengen area in much the same way as a Canadian residing in Canada. Since it’s proof of residency right and/or of citizenship that is used by the Schengen-bound airlines and seemingly most of those Schengen countries with flights from the Americas.

New Zealand citizens residing in the US are not banned from entering the Schengen area as tourists, as most commonly the US-EU flying airlines and Schengen passport control will run the admissibility checks based on just the passports.

Most US citizens are barred from the Schengen area unless in an “essential” exemption category or having accepted, government-issued residency right docs from a short list of non-European countries or from the EU/EEA+ area in Europe.

BigFlyer

You say that New Zealand and Canadian citizens residing in the US are not banned from entering Schengen. They don't need visas, but are inadmissible under the current rules, at least from my reading of the rule. What are you seeing that suggests to you that they are admissible?

GUWonder

New Zealanders who arrived to Sweden in recent days and weeks

I will look into Canadians arriving here too, but I suspect there are more of them.

BigFlyer

It may well be that as a practical matter the immigration officers are not checking residency either (the new regulations are less than a week old.) But if you look at the link I provided in my original posting I think it is clear that any non-EU citizen residing in the US is legally barred from entering Schengen (unless they fall into one of the very narrow exceptions.)

Your response kind of goes to my point - barring visitors based upon where they live rather than the passport they carry is new and either unprecedented or unusual - and it is difficult to imagine that the airlines will get it right.

GUWonder

I assume you’re familiar with TIMATIC, Now use it in the ways as as you could see airline reps use it for a NZ passport user in the US checking in for a flight via Germany to Sweden. The airline reps most commonly default to using the passport and the presented ticket info. Much the same for passport control authorities unless staying longer than allowed without a presented travel document of sort allowing a longer stay.

There is nothing new about the country of residency field in TIMATIC being present along with the country of citizenship field in the forms used. The latter is generally always verified, but the former can make a difference in terms of suitability for admissibility. It’s really not new. Maybe at some point more countries will mandate a list of countries visited in X prior days be checked and it be done via TIMATIC, but that’s not being done at this point for travel to the Schengen zone from the US.

GUWonder

Another example of government websites not always being comprehensively accurate for the time in terms of practice at least:

There is a space between the first sentence in the above paragraph and the second sentence of the paragraph, and it goes back to what that first sentence means and doesn’t mean. The decision on the restrictions being lifted and exemptions was based on the coronavirus situation for a country’s residents, but the way it’s implemented goes to citizenship and/or residency as presented by the traveler. If a traveller resides in a country where restrictions have not been lifted (by the EU), but is a national of a non-visa-required country where restrictions have been lifted or is a Schengen-member-state-visa-holding national of a visa-required country where restrictions have been lifted, they aren’t explicitly covered in that paragraph.

Also note that it’s possible to have a legal residence permit/visa/card from some countries that are not restricted (by the EU under its coronavirus-related ban) even while not having been to that country of residence as a resident for quite some time.

BigFlyer

Here's how Timatic states the current rule, which is consistent with the Europa article:Passengers are not permitted to enter the Netherlands due to the outbreak of novel coronavirus.

This does not apply to the following passengers:

1. nationals and residents of the European Union, the Schengen Area, and the United Kingdom and their family members,
2. permanent residents of Algeria, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Rwanda, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia and Uruguay,
3. passengers who are essential personnel,
4. diplomats,
5. staff of international organisations,
6. passengers travelling for emergency family situations, or
7. passengers travelling for humanitarian reasons.

GUWonder

Use the TIMATIC interfaces where the individual traveler’s details are loaded in to check admissibility.

That linked page seems to be either a bit sloppily put together on the language front; or what they were supplied deviates in practice at the border from what some of the national governments told them; or this Schengen ban version is more poorly coordinated than the prior version.

I guess this gets back to headline question: not perfectly.

Some people may be considered legal residents in more than one country at a time. Then the passenger picks?

garykung

TIMATIC is not very clear. To illustrate this, I will use myself as an example.

I am a U.S. citizen. So I am not allowed by default. However, I am also a British national, holding the recently heavily discussed BN(O) Passport. So based on this:

Quote:

nationals and residents of the European Union, the Schengen Area, and the United Kingdom and their family members,

as well as the NL Government, I would be allowed to enter.

Obviously - I am not going anywhere. But based on the conflicting information - am I a Do-Not-Admit or what?

EuropeanPete

My reading is that the EU is banning everyone except those who meet the criteria, so if someone has a “good” and a “bad” qualifier the good is probably going to be enough (e.g. Canadian residency).

keitherson

The way airlines systems work:

All citizens are residents

All residents are not necessarily citizens

It's an imperfect system but that's what they use. Everyone is aware you can be a citizen of one place and be resident somewhere else.

You can enter -- as BN(O) means you are resident of HK.

nexusCFX

Probably this. For example I have my Canadian passport and Ontario DL with an address in Ontario. But I live in the US year round so I am not really resident in Canada. There are different notions of residency too, for example the US treats me as resident for the purposes of taxes, but I am not a "permanent resident".

In any case though, if I wanted to try to get around bans obviously any airline and country will believe I'm a Canadian resident when I can present them with a Canadian passport, and a DL with an address in Canada. There is really no way for them to confirm otherwise.

GUWonder

When it comes to those EU/Schengen countries which opened up to a short list of non-European countries this month without going for additional national restrictions on those third country nationals’ entry for non-essential travel, they have in policy mostly seemed to condition the waiver on such persons being a legal resident of a whitelisted third country at time of travel to the Schengen area. But in practical implementation so far they are generally taking passports or presented legal residence permits/visas/cards issued by whitelisted countries governments as evidence of such persons being admissible into the Schengen area as coming from a whitelisted country.

They could ask for other proof of being a resident in a whitelisted country when a traveler is using a passport issued by a whitelisted country, but that’s not been commonly done. Of course, this is still very new to even most people working passport control at Schengen airports; but if the practice changes to demand something else, there is going to be the issue of people who are resident in whitelisted countries but for which there has been not much guidance about what to demand of them other than a passport and/or residence permit/visa/card issued by whitelisted countries’ governments to allow them entry into the Schengen area at this time (for those parts of the Schengen area that don’t have stricter national entry requirements than the EU/Schengen ones).

That’s indeed commonly how it goes in practice. The airlines can load in the country of residency such that it is listed differently than the country of citizenship in TIMATIC too, but they don’t do this commonly for passengers except perhaps when presented proof of legal residency status in a country that is different than that of the presented passport.

acregal

Airlines will check, just as they do now and have done for years.

Airlines, for at least the past 15 years or so, have automated most of the checks so individual agents seldom have to check Timatic. Timatic is there as a backup in the event something need to be confirmed by individual agents to determine if additional escalation is needed.

I would say the real answer depends on how long it takes for information to be loaded into the system, along with the exact checks it has.