Free Republic

The United States government is not planning to remove the current entry bn for travelers from the 26 Schengen Area Member States, Ireland, the UK, China, India, South Africa, Iran and Brazil, at least for now. Sources within the White House have confirmed for Reuters that “at this point”, the US authorities do not intend to lift any of the entry restrictions for arrivals from the abovementioned due to the concerns raised from the spread of the Delta variant in these countries. Less than a week ago, SchengenVisaInfo.com reported that the US President Joe Biden said during a news conference...

BRUSSELS - The European Union’s top official on Monday proposed a 30-day ban on anyone entering the bloc unless their travel is essential, to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, while insisting on the need to keep the internal borders between the 27 member states open as much as possible. Speaking after an extraordinary video-conference meeting of the leaders of the G-7 countries, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said travel restrictions should be in place for an initial period that can be prolonged if necessary. “The less travel, the more we can contain the virus,” von der...

Official preliminary results showed that 63.7% of voters gave their backing to new EU gun laws, including tighter controls for semi-automatic weapons. A majority of voters in all but one canton, the Italian-speaking Ticino in southern Switzerland, came out in favor of reforming Swiss gun laws. […] Swiss lawmakers had approved earlier reforms that the EU deemed sufficient to comply with its legislation; however, that prompted a huge pushback by the rightwing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which gathered enough signatures to force Sunday’s vote on the measures. […] Under the new gun law, semi-automatic weapons with high-capacity magazines would be...

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán denounced multiculturalism and liberalism Friday and vowed to fight a rising wave of migration that he said is threatening to turn his country into a “refugee camp.” In his annual state of the nation speech, Orbán called a multicultural society “a delusion” and defended his conservative government’s attempts to abandon “liberal social policies” that he accused of rejecting Christian culture. […] He was referring to the torrent of migrants who have entered European Union-member Hungary this year, many of them fleeing poverty in Kosovo and seeking to reach Germany and other western nations. …

Fresh data from Dutch police shows how irregular migrants and criminals exploit the EU’s passport-free borders. Under the rules of the so-called Schengen Area, which covers all EU countries except Bulgaria, Cyprus, Ireland, Romania and the UK, people still have to carry some form of ID and national police can still do spot-checks, so long as the European Commission does not think they amount to systematic border control. For their part, Dutch police regularly go on buses or trains crossing the Belgian and German borders to demand papers, in a practice that surprises some travelers. From last August, Dutch police...