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Comment by metachris | Hacker News Reader

The reason being that the US still requires visas from 5 EU countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Romania.

And "The EU says it notified the United States in April 2014 that it was not meeting EU visa rules, and had given the country two years to comply."

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You are forgetting the "Visa Waiver Program". Essentially, the rest of us Europeans are required to fill out detailed forms, pay a fee for filling out those forms, and then get a government-issued authorization for "visa free" travel. Right.

The EU wants to introduce its own clone of that.

The Australia visa free travel is pretty nice by comparison (last time I used it 2009). It was free and just filled in a quick form online.

As I've said below, if you have to get a visa, you have to fill out a much more detailed form [1], pay a fee that's 10 times higher (USD 160), and actually visit a US consulate for an interview with an official.

So, the visa waiver alleviates the process significantly.

[1] as the law presupposes that you want to immigrate, you have to prove non-immigration, by showing your plan to stay for a specific purpose and specific time, and show binding ties to another country to which you will return.

Also note that it's not binding, it has to go to the Commission first.

And, again, it's been an ongoing dispute since 2014. But still probably a reflection of the times.

(Note that the US Visa Waiver program is opened to countries that fulfil certain criteria in terms of (high) percentage of visa applications granted, and (low) percentage of admitted people overstaying. So, the US basically argues that they stick to their (country by country) criteria, while the EU insists on equal treatment.)

That's really interesting. So you are saying the US is actually providing "equal treatment" but since each country's stats are grouped separately, some of them fall outside the requirements and lose out on visa waiver.

Of course if you grouped the stats for all of EU it would probably bring everyone in range, but it's hard to argue that would be the right policy for the US.

The US has an immigration policy that uses the no. of immigrants from every country to make various decisions, such as diversity lottery, green card grants etc. Therefore, its kinda stuck with insisting on a country-by-country basis for making Immigration/Visa decisions. IANAL and all that, but it might require Congress to make changes to the immigration laws to allow the Executive to authorize visa free travel to people from those countries.

The point is that the US can arbitrarily keep the number of people who are refused visa as high as it wants. And than it can argue that this number is too high for visa waiver (and I bet the US is doing it for countries like Poland)

> And, again, it's been an ongoing dispute since 2014.

Not really a dispute initially, more of a concern. The original report notified 5 countries (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Japan and the US). By April 2016 the issues with Australia and Japan had been resolved and Brunei had announced their dropping of visa requirement to the EU, and in October 2016 Canada notified the EU they'd be dropping their visa requirement for Bulgarians and Romanians through 2017.

However,

> Despite the stepping up of political and technical contacts, there have not been comparable indications of progress towards the lifting of visas with the U.S.

> while the EU insists on equal treatment.

That's actually an EU rule it put in place back in 2001: EU visa waiver requires full reciprocity

what most likely would happen as most of these agreements is full reciprocity. i.e., like Europeans have to pay $14 for the ESTA visa waiver to travel in the US, Americans would have to do the same and register online.

That visa waiver would hopefully work for the entire E.U.

Or, like Australia, Brunei, Japan, and Canada which were similarly notified and implemented the changes, the US will do the same.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/europe-visa-f...

Can we do full reciprocity in terms of taxes and tariffs on imports?

The US would need reasonable public healthcare first.

$14 is visa waiver. Visa is much more expensive, $160, plus a visit to the consulate for an interview.

It's not simply the financial implications; the visa-process for B1/B2 entails handing over a ton of paperwork (e.g. student records, health records, employment records, etc.) which go into your file, and further, all your 10 fingerprints. The VWP doesn't entail all of that extra stuff. One could argue that the $160-$14 saving is but the simple part, the bigger issue is the loss of privacy that comes with the application of a visa.

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