Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
When I traveled last time, I have witnessed an European denied entry for a reason I don't know, and a white male without any beard has been escorted into the immigration office.
Said office had a giant window. The officers were just chatting with him while checking his documents, and also drinking some coffee and eating some cake. I didn't look that long to see whether they have offered the same to him (because it's rude).
Also, I don't have an EU/UK/US passport, and I just pass fine.
For some EU perspective: last summer we traveled with a group of social dancers from Berlin to Pula in Croatia, going to an event at the coast.
Croatia joined Schengen in January 2023.
We had one couple in the group that where not "white". She is German but her parents are Vietnamese and he is from Syria. They're married, they have German citizenship.
They were the only ones from our group of ~20 people who got singled out and had their papers and luggage (!) checked. She looks Asian, he looks Middle-Eastern (oh, and he has a beard!).
That said, they just took 10mins longer to make it through the arrivals hall. They didn't get incarcerated.
However, the year before they were traveling to a dance event in Belgrade. That was was before they got married so he didn't have a German passport yet. He only had a Syrian passport and a residence permit for Germany/Schengen.
Serbia is not part of the EU. Usually such a mistake means they just send you back on the next flight. Happened to two friends of mine, both "white US citizens, who didn't also know this and were traveling to Belgrade from Switzerland two years before.
My Syrian friend however spent three days in a jail in cell with a dozen criminals before they let him fly back to Germany. Mind you, the event they went to was four days and he had a return ticket that could have been easily changed to the arrival day.
Racial profiling is everywhere. Also in the EU. And some EU countries are more "famous" for it, the Balkans e.g.
> Serbia is not part of the EU
> Racial profiling is everywhere. Also in the EU.
Some countries are more "famous" for it, but that's really just a matter of perception and how it fits into an existing narrative, not based on actual evidence.
It's not like there's data showing that racial profiling is lower in France, Germany, and Sweden than it is in Eastern Europe.
Depends on which part of Europe. In the more diverse parts, nobody would bat an eyelid (even if border police might profile you).
EU Eastern Europe, you might get funny looks but it's still not an extraordinary situation to have various shades of skin colour (e.g. Syrians, various Central Asians are migrant workers in a few of the countries in question; a lot of e.g. the Balkans are on a palette of skin colours).
Non-EU Eastern Europe (referring more to Belarus than Montenegro here), might get casual racism.
Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like. Other than of course the usual suspects of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and etc. who could for any reason.
As a person who matches the description above, and has traveled to Europe extensively and frequently, I can tell you that as much as Europeans like to believe this is this case, it is absolutely not true.
> Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like. Other than of course the usual suspects of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and etc. who could for any reason.
Unless you're making some extremely critical assumptions about how much wear the word "indefinite" can bear, this is unfortunately not true either.
Now, officially the shengen zone means there's no need to show your documents between countries. But countries still don't want certain people coming in. And they don't want drugs smuggled in either.
It was really interesting who they decided to pull aside for a chat. It was almost always men who were travelling alone. Almost always men who were in the 25-45 age range. And I wouldn't be surprised if there was some racial profiling going on as well. The police never questioned me - probably because I was with my girlfriend the whole time. If she wasn't there, I bet I would have been pulled aside every time too.
Anyway, I believe your experience in Europe. But if you were a man travelling alone, its possible it was partially or fully due to that. For about a decade, every time I went through security at an airport I was always "randomly selected" to have my bag swabbed for chemicals. It never happens any more, and I'm as white as they come. I assume it was a gender + age + travelling alone thing - but its still a mystery to me.
Most EU country police don’t need probable cause to detain you. It does happen to be detained for no reason outside of profiling. For example, in France, you can be sent to jail for up to 24h with no probable cause.
And as you describe in the EU it's "up to 24 hours". And in the lawless authoritarian regime? That Canadian girl was detained for 11 days and was told to prepare to be held for months: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/jasmine-moon...
A friend's family flew into a EU country with a letter, they thought this letter was their visa but it turned out to be a rejection from the EU country's consulate (maybe it was a request for more information for their visa application). They were denied entry, but there was no indefinite detention, they were just told to get on the next plane out of the country and had to wait in the "international area" of the airport until said flight.
There must be a probable cause : https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F14837
But this admin highly disagrees with that notion. Really hope the courts start throwing heads sooner rather than later.
I can answer that! It is pretty uneventful. My experience with the border checks in airports was always very pleasant (despite the lines, depending on the airport they can be pretty long)
Now I am not saying we are uniform half a billion, not at all, wear burka in eastern EU in some small backwardish village and you will raise eyebrows and maybe more. Try that in US and its the same, to put it mildly.
With a Canadian or American passport (until recently)? No problem.
With an Iranian passport? Probably more problems.
First of all, the folks profiling and detaining you don't ask you where your passport is from first - they'll generally make the decision and then ask for your documentation.
But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.
It depends. Most countries do have certain kinds of extra policies for passports of certain countries. For example, Visa fraud, especially for education visas, is extremely common from India. So extra checks for those that the acceptance letter isn't from some diploma mill and that they're not coming to work illegally tends to to occur more often.
But the same is true for local citizens that make odd, quick trips to certain countries that tend to be sources for drug smuggling - you're going to probably get pulled aside.
Being a border guard is 40% art, 40% science, 10% luck, and 10% other.
> But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.
You're a citizen, though. Unless they think you're importing something you shouldn't, you're far less likely to be hassled as you have more rights than others.
As a Canadian, I found that Canadian border agents tend to harass their own citizens, especially at land crossings, because the default assumption seems to be we're trying to dodge paying duties.
I've found American border guards mostly tend to act terse and rude (possibly as a strategy to try and trip you up?), though some of the nicest I've ever met were also American. I've found most EU guards with my Canadian passport to be bored and slow, though that may be because most Canadians going to Europe are just vacationing?
We discriminate based on what country you're from. =)
[0] I am well aware there is racism in Europe, it's just ... different here.
