Editorial
Although it should not have any impact on short-term business travel, the wide-scale exodus of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa is undoubtedly leading to the tightening of visa controls for business visitors and to an increase in corrupt practices by officials or their agents.
It is difficult to believe it now, but in 1900 it was possible to travel from London to Moscow without any travel documents at all. Although the modern passport was a medieval invention, its enforcement was intermittent and the advent of rail travel in Europe up until the First World War led to a complete relaxation of border controls. Visas have a more uncertain origin, but probably owe their origin to ‘letters of safe passage’ issued by local governments specifying cities that could be visited.
Although there was a move to open up borders at the end of the last century, very few countries or territories now offer visa-free travel to short-term visitors from the vast majority of countries around the world. The few principal exceptions are Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. This is heavily outweighed by the countries — such as Australia, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the USA — that require visas from all but a tiny handful of other nationals.
Evidence that visa restrictions are now tightening up abound. Only in the last month examples include the fact that Finland has introduced finger print scans for visitors from Russia, Turkey has imposed visa requirements on Libyan citizens, Malawi has announced it is introducing a general requirement for entry with a visa, visa waivers between Vietnam and Cambodia have been suspended, and entry visas have been introduced between Cameroon and Mali. Recently also the UK, Canada and Australia have each changed the rules on Investor (entrepreneur) visas to make it much more difficult to qualify.
Visa enforcement is not only building up longer queues at airports, but is moving onto the streets. Australia, for instance, merged its customs and immigration department in July and armed its officers, allowing them to operate on the streets of cities such as Melbourne seeking out those who have overstayed their visas.
It is also clear from available statistics that European Union countries issue Schengen visitor visas in a wholly inconsistent way. Although France is by far the most popular country for submission of visa applications — largely because it is the fastest to process them — it is the most bureaucratic and operates a 90% visa acceptance quota. Lithuania, on the other hand, accepts 99% of applications.
Many countries use private visa agency companies to process applications. The fees for this service are generally so low that both the companies and individual agents require ‘special fees’ to process the paperwork or to provide ‘advice’. There are press reports this week too of ‘irregularities’ in Malta’s Tripoli Embassy over the issue of visas to Libyan nationals. Although Malta has an official population of just over 400,000, it has issued 75,000 Schengen visas since 2011. Once in Malta, most ‘visitors’ move on to other Schengen countries and few return home.