I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens.
Wow, I'm almost annoyed on the authors behalf of how much hoops there are to jump through.
>To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago. Not approximately five years, not that week—that exact day when you press "submit" on the form minus five years. Miss it by 24 hours and your application is reject after months of waiting, and you have to pay a hefty fee to re-apply.
That's a hilarious requirement. I wonder how that ended up in there.
First, the author is actually wrong. The date is not 5 years before you submit, but is 5 years before the form is received by the home office! So there are a few days of uncertainty, depending on how fast Royal Mail was with the physical documents.
Additionally, I did a request for my information from the home office prior to filling in my form. After all, you have the right to request the information they have on you that will be used to verify your form. Kafka would be proud.
Let me tell you, Home Office doesn't have a clue where you were 5 years ago. It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey. Plane, ferry, train, sailboat, ... it didn't matter. It seems like they have not been keeping the information very well.
> It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey
Relevant current news: Home Office denying child benefits to 1000s of people because they had incomplete data of people vacation trips, so people were thought to have emigrated and never returned [0]. Some people who never even left (due to cancelled flights, denied boardings etc.) were also affected.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/01/hmrc-likely...
This is because the UK doesn't have exit checks. They rely on airlines to submit the information to them.
I guess this makes sense when you consider that there's an open border with Ireland. Though you'd think that the UK and Ireland could get together to track exits...
The UK's borders used to be hilariously lax. In 2000 I travelled a lot. To leave, as you note, you just left.
To return, you'd walk past a man at Heathrow who was invariably reading the paper. He had his feet up on the desk. You were walking at a clip, passport held aloft, photo page ostensibly open towards him.
That was it. Immigrated.
In 2014 I landed on either Heathrow or another London airport I don’t remember coming from Spain after a vacation
I read on a sign “travellers from Europe this way” and I thought ok my flight came from Spain I’m going that way … when I saw I was out of the airport with no immigration whatsoever
In hindsight it obviously meant if you’re European (which I’m not), I was in shock how easy someone could get in the UK !
Are you sure your passport wasn’t checked?
What you’re describing sounds like it was the customs check. Pre-brexit, if you were arriving from the EU, then there was no customs check since we were all part of the same customs union.
The usual flow is
immigration check -> baggage collection -> customs check
Yeah wasn’t checked. I’m pretty sure it was a smaller airport than Heathrow. I definitely went through the wrong path out
Perhaps your passport was checked on departure instead of on arrival? At least that's how it worked when taking the Eurostar train.
Even if they did check his passport, he didn't have an EU passport so probably shouldn't have been allowed to skip customs.
From a customs perspective, flying from one EU country to another EU is treated like a domestic flight.
If I (a British citizen) flew from London to New York, then on to Chicago; I'd expect to go through customs when I arrived at New York, but not when I arrived at Chicago.
I don't know about UK, but my experience is the signs for EU and non-EU point different directions, but either way you just go through a door that leads to the exact same place. I've been told that when they are looking for "something" they will put extra checks at the non-EU door, but if you have a US passport (I presume other countries like Canada) in hand they will send you through the EU door.
No, you were good. You were already inside the Schengen Area so you actually took the correct path, though I can see how the sign seems vague now I read it from your perspective.
The UK was never in the Schengen Area, though.
2 years ago I landed at London City (from Zurich), got off the plane and then we all walked all the way to the exit without being stopped by a single human to check passports or customs. I couldn't believe it.
I am not a British or EU citizen
20+ years of lighting our hair on fire over immigration and we still have no idea who is in the country.
Starmer addressed this a while back, accusing the Tories of campaigning on reducing immigration while actually running an experiment in open borders. Having made this statement, he then proceeded to do nothing about immigration himself.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2024/nov/28/keir-...
It seems to be a bipartisan thing in the UK to recognize that the electorate really doesn’t want immigration, and then not to fulfill the will of the electorate. Instead, the politicians use that will to accomplish unrelated goals like imposing a national digital ID.
> the electorate really doesn’t want immigration
Is that the case or is there just a significant minority that cares and the rest are happy enough as things are and would get mad if there was change - thus making their approach rational: get the votes of those who care but don't do anything because then you will be voted out next term.
I don't know myself, but this is something that I've wondered about a lot of issues that I care about where nothing happens. (I've long been on the side of more immigration)
Politicians like campaign on reducing immigration because it's an easy thing to campaign on. They don't like to actually do anything about it because (1) it's hard, especially when you want to comply with laws and treaties and (2) effectively reducing immigration could hamper the ability to campaign on reducing immigration.
He's done plenty (https://ukandeu.ac.uk/the-coming-collapse-in-immigration/), following on from the changes Sunak made, which are already showing up in the early numbers this year.
But of course it's never going to be enough for the noisily anti-immigration lot.
> It seems to be a bipartisan thing in the UK to recognize that the electorate really doesn’t want immigration
Usually, it's not an "inner wish" of the electorate, but the electorate gets manipulated to feel that way by mass media, especially tabloids. Outrage sells, after all, especially when it can be laced to make it more effective.
The problem at the core is that immigration is vital for societies, especially the low-pay-hard-labor segment. Has the UK found a replacement for Ukrainian and Polish farm workers yet [1]?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/15/pounds-6...
> Usually, it's not an "inner wish" of the electorate, but the electorate gets manipulated to feel that way by mass media, especially tabloids. Outrage sells, after all, especially when it can be laced to make it more effective.
As you say, the tabloids sell what people want to read. Who's manipulating whom?
> The problem at the core is that immigration is vital for societies, especially the low-pay-hard-labor segment. Has the UK found a replacement for Ukrainian and Polish farm workers yet [1]?
Immigration is also good for the would be immigrants.
Though if you are only interested in cheap labour (and giving foreigners jobs which are better than what they can get at home), you can run a guest worker programmer without giving them the right to stay. Singapore has a few successful programmes like that.
Ie you can have cheap labour without permanent immigration.
I'm in favour of open borders; but if for political reasons you can't have permanent immigration, guest worker programmes are better than completely closed borders.
I think people who are against immigration usually also are against guest workers. They've negative sentiment towards seeing people not looking like them, without knowing whether they are permanent residents or only here for six months. It's a gut feeling based on stereotypes and prejudices not facts.
Maybe. But for better or worse, most people don't say this out loud.
See also https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretatio... Basically, people don't like having to look at poverty, and rather have poor people stay far away (and even poorer).
GCHQ has metadata on all digital communications - even among homeless and immigrant populations have near 100% mobile daily usage.
"We" surely have pretty good information about number of adults in the UK, and if the security services are worth their salt we know their names and associations.
Heck, the main supermarkets can probably tell you within a percent or two what the live demographics of the country are.
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Well, that's what you get for not running a totalitarian country.
By and large, it's a feature, not a bug, that the government isn't sharing all the information it has between its various parts.
Eg GCHQ has lots of information it has (ostensibly) for keeping the country safe, but that doesn't mean that the prosecution in a criminal case should get access to all the same information.
Of course, that's a bit inefficient and duplicates efforts. But such is a price for restrained government.
> I guess this makes sense when you consider that there's an open border with Ireland.
Weren't the other borders with the Schengen area open, too? Eg if you take a small boat from England to Denmark, no one needed to check anything.
In the context of the issue that doesn't really make sense. The issue is that the home office think you left and didn't come back. How would an exit check tell the home office you have come back into the country?
In a country that has exit checks, in order to go airside, a border agent will stamp you out and record your exit. If you were to get stamped out and then decide that you don't want to catch your flight after all, you'd have to get stamped back in again (often not a real stamp these days).
In the UK there's no exit checks. The only information they have is that you booked a flight. This is "Advance Passenger Information" which all airlines are legally required to submit. They don't know if you've actually boarded the flight, they just assume that if you booked a flight that it means you left the country.
The exit check doesn't tell them that you've come back, they know that already unless you cross the land border. But it does tell them that you truly left and stop the guesswork.
* * *
> Ireland dislikes the UK since the UK invaded it
This was centuries before the UK. The Normans came to Ireland by invitation of Macmurphy, King of Leinster, to help him restore his power, in exchange for promises of territory. This barely counts as a conquest CB, but with certainty not as an invasion.
The Tudor conquest of Ireland involved the English and Scottish. It was before the UK existed, but was perpetrated by the constituents of the UK. At least, the ancestors of the contemporary constituents. Maybe not of Wales though, I don't know.
Fwiw, in the time period you're talking about Wales was just a label for a group of English counties, each fully annexed to England like any other county. The rulers were of Welsh heritage, the Tudors being from Gwynedd in N Wales (I suspect originally Norse, possibly via Ireland).
Strangely, no 'English' people have ruled England since the latter Norman invasion.
Scotland and Wales often try to pretend they weren't part of the Empire and its horrors - in reality their were nobles/toffs/rich nobs from all across GB (at least) doing their part. Barely any of our ancestors were involved in any way other than servitude.
(My family are from both sides of the Anglo-Irish conflicts.)
This is such an interesting insight. Thank you. The part about barely any ancestors being involved apart from servitude is quite a common thread in history since empires began.
> Maybe not of Wales though,
The original Tudors were Welsh.
Huh, I'd totally missed that. I need to brush up on my history in this part of the world. It's way more interesting than I used to think. Thanks for that
> The open border treaty was put in place because the alternative was either giving the territory back, or nonstop terrorism (look up the Irish Republican Army) until they gave the territory back.
The Common Travel Area's origins are in the the period 1923-1925[0], although it wasn't called that back then...
this is a genuinely awful description of Irish history
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Speak for yourself, not the Irish.
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As someone who's been through that dance twice, it's 5 years from the time (well, day) you press "Submit" if you're applying online, or $RANDOM days of Royal Mail nonsense if you choose to apply by post.
I agree though, the Home Office doesn't have a way of knowing where you were fore sure 5 years ago unless they got someone to go through your "days in and out of the UK" list and vetted/cross-referenced it. And even then it'd likely be incomplete and they'd have to guess.
My surmise is that they look at the level of effort you've put in to filling out that detail, and if the total days in/out isn't particularly a borderline case, then they just wave that bit through.
I would have thought that the point is that you're supposed to be there continuously for some considerable duration (and having worked through other processes of legal immigration) before applying for citizenship.
So the idea of trying to figure out exactly which day five years in the past you have to mention seems odd to me. If there's really no care being paid to the intervening time... well if you're trying to exploit a loophole like that I think I'd prefer that it's difficult... ?
i think they meant online, which could be different?
As someone that is about 50, we also had it this way in Europe.
Newer generations don't get how lucky they are to have been born into EU, appreciate it while it lasts.
Too bad there aren't too many people in their 90s around to discuss how things operated prior to WWII. Schengen was a solution to a problem that had only been created a few decades earlier.
Schengen is NOT a EU achievement.
Nations can sign Schengen, but are never forced to join the EU, nations can be EU members but are allowed to refuse the Schengen treaties.
Schengen is absolutely an EU achievement, although for some time it developed separately; it is now absorbed into EU law. Note that every Schengen country outside of the EU is a member of EFTA and to be in Schengen has to sign an association treaty with the EU.
Yes. Though it's part of the same broader 'European project', so it's permissible for people to be a bit lax when informally discussing these things.
Where have I said that on my comment?
I'm almost 50 and from Europe, never had to think about this stuff for a second.
Well I remember the fun days of crossing borders before EU, ordering stuff from computer magazines from other countries, having to deal how to pay them across countries, and so forth.
I also happened to work in Switzerland, before they made cross-region agreements with EU, and it was lot of burecratic fun, explaining the situation regarding a Portuguese, living in France and working in Switzerland.
I'm mid fourties and I remember bordercrossings were annoying back in the 90ies. I'm Danish so we didn't enter Schengen until around 2000. I guess it didn't help that I was young enough that we traveled by bus. Once when we were on a school trip to Prauge we had the Slovakia borderpatrol go through our entire bus while waving machineguns around.
> we had the Slovakia borderpatrol go through our entire bus while waving machineguns around
Quite common in Eastern Europe before Schengen. That's why we hate border patrols, police and all sorts of uniformed men in general. They used to cut young people's blue jeans or long hair back in the '80s and bribing them was common before 2005. We also had quite a lot of policemen jokes (they were called militia men before 1990). One goes like "Why do militia men work in couples? Because one knows how to read and the other knows how to write.". I used to wish that we join Schengen so we no longer have to deal with border police any longer and they'd lose their jobs or get moved to a different border. If finally happened. Now Germany Poland, Austria and also other EU states introduce "temporary" border checks. Which they keep extending. Great.
I thought they worked in groups of 3: one knows how to write, the second knows how to read, and the third is there to keep an eye on the dangerous intellectuals.
> Now Germany Poland, Austria and also other EU states introduce "temporary" border checks. Which they keep extending. Great.
Yeah. Though I live close to a Slovakia-Austria border crossing and use it frequently and it is quite apparent these are border checks in the name only. Pedestrians and bikers are not checked at all; passenger cars are waved through and only vans and busses seem to be actually stopped for a check and even that depends. Still sucks compared to no border police presence at all.
I crossed the Austria-Hungary land border at Hegyeshalom in... 2017? They had "border checks" in place. I was driving a German-plated rental car, and my wife and I are obviously of European descent. They waved me through before I could even pull our (USA) passports out to show them.
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Germany still does this, to a good fraction of incoming long distance busses (but not trains IIUC)
Correct, and not just Germany. I have travelled all over Europe by bus and train. In recent years borders have been making a comeback, despite Schengen. Buses are target number 1 for border police.
Last year my bus took nearly an hour to get across the Serbia-Croatia border, which is technically a Schengen border, but Serbia is surrounded by Europe so security is usually lax. We all had to get off and go through passport control while the police combed the bus. Meanwhile, car traffic was being waved through without the slightest formality. Infuriating.
The Serbia-Croatia border is definitely not a Schengen border; I assume that was a typo.
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Indeed. Typo. Too late to fix.
Wait! It was not a typo. Serbia-Croatia is indeed a Schengen border (Croatia is in Schengen). My point was that there was anti-bus discrimination even at this low-security border.
At the supposed non-borders within the Schengen zone, police are increasingly present. Often they get on buses (and trains) just to check out the passengers, obviously looking for passengers with migrant profiles.
Two or three years ago I crossed the ultra-low-security Germany-Denmark border on a local bus. There was no border security but I overheard the driver making an intentional phone call to someone to say that he had a foreign tourist aboard. Schengen has not completely abolished borders, alas.
Btw, long distance busses have a really strange history in Germany.
The literal Nazis made a law that virtually banned long distance busses inside of Germany, and the market was only liberalised in 2013. Deregulation and liberalisation often get a bad rep, but they have done a lot for us.
(To be more precise, the Nazis didn't outright ban long distance busses directly, what they did was give the government railway monopoly a veto over most bus routes and lots of extra restrictions. Which amounted to the same result as a ban. Just like the US doesn't directly ban buying from the world's most popular electric car brand or importing photovoltaic cells: they just slap outrageous 100%+ tariffs on them.)
I guess you never tried to cross the Iron Curtain in your youth?
The sane side of the iron curtain. We've envied you for the longest time.
As a 29 year old that experienced EU citizenship then had it cruelly taken away by some stupidly thin margin of voters… feckin Brexit.
I get how lucky I was for 25% of my life expectancy.
>I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens.
Most people can't afford to travel to the Schengen Area for more than the visa-free limit of 90 days within a 180 day period.
Those that can are "digital nomads" and are almost certainly working illegally while travelling.
Most of those work restrictions are put in place to protect local labor. They just don't want tourists taking jobs from locals in tourist places without a permit, and without paying taxes. They really don't care much you're doing remote work for a corporation in California or writing a book.
> They really don't care much you're doing remote work for a corporation in California or writing a book.
They do, actually.
It’s for collecting taxes, which supports local infrastructure.
Going to another country, living within their infrastructure and consuming their services, but pretending that you’re not working (and therefore not paying local taxes) is something they don’t want.
Digital nomads who abuse the situation like it because they get the benefits of a country (and city, region, etc) without having to contribute to their taxes. Getting California level pay, not paying taxes, and living in what’s basically a vacation destination is the digital nomad dream.
This is not the full picture, as you surely know.
Remote workers from rich countries do pay tax locally, in the form of VAT and sales taxes. And they typically spend far more than locals, on food to accommodation and everything in between, all while requiring nothing of the local welfare state. It's a direct wealth transfer of thousands per month, earned in one economy and spent in another. In purely economic terms, it's hard to see how this is anything but a good deal for the host country, in the large majority of cases. Hence digital nomad visas.
This is not to say that countries - and societies - don't have the right to allow or deny access to foreigners as they see fit.
spending more than locals on rent is actually one huge problem with digital nomads
And that's a big shame!
You can set up your tax system so that you raise a lot of public money from foreigners using your real estate. Be that Chinese tycoons parking their money in London apartments, or digital nomads renting a large house in the countryside.
It's really straightforward: a high enough property tax will do it automatically. Or if you want to get fancy, use a land value tax, which is like a property tax, but you get a discount for the value of the building.
Between "renting an empty house in the country" and "buying a flat to park money", there is a major difference IMO. The second scenario pushes up housing costs for locals and is almost certainly not a good deal for the host society.
Even the first scenario will fuel inflation, especially given the typical spending power of rich foreigners. It's complicated.
> Between "renting an empty house in the country" and "buying a flat to park money", there is a major difference IMO. The second scenario pushes up housing costs for locals and is almost certainly not a good deal for the host society.
Developers are happy to produce more housing, if there's demand and construction is legal.
Why is producing widgets to sell to foreigners (=exports) generally seen as a good thing, but producing housing to sell to foreigners is seen as bad?
> Even the first scenario will fuel inflation, especially given the typical spending power of rich foreigners. It's complicated.
The central bank controls inflation.
Countries usually like tourism, don't they? But tourists are also living there and consuming services with no income tax. What's the difference?
One thing to note is that even if you're not paying income tax there, you're bringing tons of money into the country from outside. So that's worth something.
They don’t care too much as long as you don’t qualify for / consume social benefits like medical.
It depends. And different people care about different things.
Eg some people complain about tourists renting AirBnBs. Some people complain about digital nomads competing for rental apartments.
As you suggest, lots of other people are happy for tourists and digital nomads to come in and bring money to the local economy.
And some people are happy to receive the benefits, and still complain about the drawbacks. People really like to complain!
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Then they should change the laws to match. I've heard this time and time again. All the digital nomads I know are dodging taxes.
Immigration permission to work legally and tax compliance for the earnings are two completely different topics in probably all countries.
Even mostly law-abiding citizens with full work permission often dodge taxes in certain sectors of the economy - a common US example is restaurant workers underreporting cash tips on their tax returns. Plus, in addition to digital nomads, many freelancers (certainly not all) play as fast and loose with the tax rules even in their home countries as they think they can get away with. And much cross-border employment is disguised as independent contracting in ways that dodge employers’ tax burdens even when the employee has full work permission.
Conversely, there are already cases where even income earned illegally by visiting foreigners can legally be exempt from a country’s taxes. Example: Income earned in Canada by a US resident can qualify for Canada-US tax treaty’s exemption from Canadian taxation if the criteria listed in the treaty are met, regardless of whether the work was legal for immigration purposes. (Canada is actually one of the few countries from which foreign tourists can often legally work remotely for employers or clients abroad, but that depends on a lot of factors, and it can also be illegal like in most countries.)
The number of people affected (in principal that is, even fewer in practice) is likely so small that the political time involved would not be justified.
Last time I looked was a few years ago, but I was surprised how hard it was going to be to legally live in France while keeping my US tech job. My employer was happy to do what they had to to make it happen, but there just didn't seem to be a route in the French immigration system.
The options seemed to be:
- Get a job in France and get a work visa. This is very difficult due to economic protectionism.
- Come on a tourist visa and not work.
- Be provably independently wealthy and get some variety of golden visa. This meant proving that you had enough assets to live (lavishly I might add) long term without working.
No easy option for "I want to come to your country, get paid USD by a US company, but pay taxes to you!"
I think there have been some new developments regarding digital nomad visas since then. Still, seemed crazy given what a good arrangement it would have been for France.
It doesn't exist, because it's complex to set up and up until 5 years ago almost no one wanted to do this. Now some people want to do it, and they can use an Employer of Record via facilitating companies. But the visa situation will probably still be difficult, it's pretty much a gap
Illegally = like smoking weed in Amsterdam
Except few countries, all EU countries tolerate this
Although the EES biometric system that just got added is intended to crack down on this
Despite being required to, most crossings I did recently did not use it, though
I think it is more for overstays. Years ago when I asked about my stayed days ( I was traveling a lot ) , border guard took passport and tried to count then gave up
Indeed, the author describes a lifestyle I can hardly imagine, and then markets a product motivated by the resulting use cases.
> Most people can't afford to travel to the Schengen Area for more than the visa-free limit of 90 days within a 180 day period.
> Those that can are "digital nomads" and are almost certainly working illegally while travelling.
WTF are you talking about? The Schengen Area is right here and you don't need a visa to work anywhere else in it. That's the whole point.
If you are an EU citizen (or a citizen of one of the other Schengen Area countries) then yes, you have freedom of movement and can live and work anywhere in the area without a visa.
But the article isn't talking about being an EU Citizen. It's talking about having to count how many days have been spent in the Schengen Area by a third-country national.
Citizens of certain other countries (e.g. the USA or UK) can enter the Schengen Area visa-free for tourism or limited work-related activities (for up to 90 days in a 180 day period), but are not allowed to just do whatever work they want to.
Note that the comment I replied to was talking about non-EU Citizens.
If you don't live in the EU the rules are different. They often don't care but the rules are there. (I've been sent through the EU citizen line with my US passport which is normally fine but my coworkers on a multi year work in the EU visa have to be more careful about the right stamps - though I'm not sure exactly what this means)
They're talking about people from outside the EU presumably.
> I called the app Residency and you can get it here. No subscriptions, costs less than an airport martini, and you'll likely regret it less a few hours later.
The article is content marketing, so I wouldn't be surprised if the pain points are being talked up somewhat (but who knows?)
Anecdotal evidence: timezone-aware precision might be only necessary for those pushing it to very edge of the allowances, but travel log spreadsheet was very very real for me, and everyone else in my own immigrant bubble. I still have it somewhere.
UK officials seem to operate on vibes though, not obsessive precision - I witnessed missed presence days being successfully propped up with a good sob story, but I can imagine it still being useful if you need to appeal a case where vibe turned against you.
Then was a short rest between making oath and Brexit, and here we are at that shit again - spreadsheet is back, and there's a script for Schengen rolling days.
“Vibes” sometimes work against you. This is a great app for documenting that you met the rules if you need to.
Back in 2000, entry to Canada was based on vibes. I had no idea what I was doing but looking back I don’t think they’d let someone in who forgets their DL, passport, and is on a “management consultant visa”.
Guessing it stems from "we need something dead-simple to evaluate that yields a definite yes-or-no answer, with no annoying variables."
I'm trying to think of some other reason they might want a specific moment rather than "pick your own instant within this span", but I can't think of anything. Even if it was to "make sure you aren't claiming the same time on two applications to different places", the person could have simply staggered the applications.
The other reason is more mundane. There's been a lot of political incentive to reduce immigration for a long time, which means adding arbitrary friction to increase the effort of applying and decrease the number of successful applicants.
Whether this is _effective_ is a different question, but certainly it's gotten a lot harder in recent decades, even pre-Brexit.
That explanation doesn’t seem to jive with the fact that post-COVID the UK has accepted millions of immigrants
That millions were accepted says nothing about the process having changed for the worse.
it does, if the alternative would have been "more millions"
lol, that’s extra funny considering that the boat people can just appear and receive not only the de facto right to remain, but get free hotel rooms for years. Meanwhile productive people with useful skills are tortured with red tape.
My guess is that if you need to have been there for 5y, you need to have a way to tell when that 5y starts. I presume it only matters if you apply the day after 5y. When I applied I had been in the UK for over 10y, provided 10y worth of proof of address, and the issue never came up.
It's not even hard really, I did it lastyear. I book a visit to the city hall, they look into the address db and see when I registered the first time. I see exactlt the same thing myself when I login into the thing.
The official agrees with me on the appointment date to actually submit the application, that is after cutoff date.
I put a signature on one sheet of paper, pay a thousand and go my way. The thing takes 15 min tops.
But it's continental Europe, not UK
It depends on where you're going and what you're doing.
A lot of this faff isn't relevant if you're not applying for any visas or citizenship. Which is most people, most of the time.
The obvious solution to most of these problems for most people is "don't cut it close to any of the limits". If you enjoy traveling a lot, that's definitely a problem, but most people don't cross borders often enough to run into this many corner cases.
This is only a small peek into the awful bureaucracy that will hit Europe if extreme right wing parties keep gaining popularity across the EU. The extra calculations Brexit imposes, but not for every country you travel through!
> A lot of this faff isn't relevant if you're not applying for any visas or citizenship. Which is most people, most of the time.
That’s true for many, but my passport isn’t very strong, so I still have to deal with a lot of paperwork for most transits.
If your job is travel, like you are an international truck driver or maybe aircrew, these kinds of things might affect you a lot sometimes.
There's probably special rules for those people in some places, which makes the situation even more complicated.
The point is not to produce a system where a software engineer can loophole the system. The point is to try to prevent people who aren't committed to the UK apply for citizenship.
Yes, but…
Convoluted rules like that smack of the ridiculous literacy tests for voting in the US during the Jim Crow era (if you don't know why the terms “grandfathering” and “grandfather clause” have fallen out of fashion in recent years, go have a poke around that bit of history which is where those terms originate).
Either that or it looks like a dysfunctional overly-complicated system like the mechanisms draw by Heath Robinson, which while better still isn't good. How many good (morally) and useful (i.e. to the economy) people are being rejected because of unnecessary complications like this?
> To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago.
I am confused whats British citizenship application to do with his, or any travel at all? That's not what you do regularly, I mean most people do not apply for citizenship in other countries ever in their lives? Or am I missing something?
He needs to plan travel very carefully in order to not accidentally undermine his citizenship application.
> I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens.
I traveled before and I traveled after Schengen and the only thing that changed was not having to wait a bit at border control. What the article describe concerns a very small number of people, and exist only because of cheap air travel and internet
Do you think applying on February 29 is allowed?
Note also that this isn't a travel requirement.
It’s just as difficult for EU citizens when traveling to most of the world.
I'll tell you a secret, UK gov has no clue where you were 5 years ago :-)
Right now the biggest problem in life is the country of my passport.
I have enough in savings and enough passive income to be able to live comfortably almost anywhere, but whenever I talk to travel agents, or people who can help set up companies etc in the countries I want to go to, first they're like "Sure, we can do it, when do you want it" etc and then they ask where I'm from, and when I tell them, they either stop replying or say sorry, they can't help me.
sigh...Racism is a funny thing. They haven't even seen me, or seen my history of travel, or anything, they just stop cooperating when they see that one word, the name of my country.
And I can't blame them either, I know many people from here go and overstay there visas and generally make problems in other countries.
I just wish I could put down a deposit of a few thousand dollars as a guarantee that I'll behave and get a visa.
Germany lets you get a Chancenkarte with a deposit of 1000EUR/month to look for a job upto a year.
This is actually standard for other countries too
But it is a ridculous requirement. Like having a millsecond-hand one a pendulum clock it appears to be to precise for the timeframe involved
Why not just make it a before-date if you care for someone having been here for a time? So just proof that you have been here X years ago or longer. Totally sufficient and much easier to have at hand.
But this is of course the point. It isn't policy where the state requires a certain thing and all people who fulfill the requirement have a shot. Instead the state makes the process of demonstrating the requirement hard on purpose as a means of reducing the people who get the benefit.
And this idea isn't just unique to the described process. It is everywhere. A bit of friction in certain places is placed there on purpose and it can also be a net positive for that friction to exist. But beyond a certain level it can turn people with rights into beggars.
Immigration laws and memos (aka office procedures) are usually opaque and ambigous by design. Be it for exploitable loopholes that benefit internal production, or whatever.
Speaking of the EU, in Italy specifically for example the naturalization is really opaque and there's no clear process deadlines. While you can submit after 10 years of residence in Italy, with additional documentation from your country of origin, the process of actually getting a reply (denied or approved) may take usualy 5+ years, for some people even a decade because the people that should work on the papers forget them above a desk under a pile of dust for years.
Immagine having only third-world-like country citizenship. It's a travel nightmare.
[dead]
> buy a sausage roll at Greggs
If that's the first thing he thinks of while transiting through a UK airport, he deserves a citizenship, no questions.
The Life in the UK test certainly needs updating.
claude is nothing if not sensitive to cultural differences
It's a great article... but a strange title?
This is about all the country-specific requirements for tax residency, visas, citizenship, etc.
But I don't know what downloading a border means. The title makes it sound like this is going to be about downloading national mapping data... If the author was looking for an evocative metaphor, I don't think this one works. Maybe it's supposed to refer to:
> It would be alright with a single source of truth, but all these facts are scattered across (semi)official websites and PDFs, and you're supposed to figure it out yourself.
But they got those all through... downloading. I.e. cURL.
I think it's a reference to those "You wouldn't download a car" memes on anti-piracy campaigns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn%27t_Steal_a_Car
I had the same association. "You wouldn't cURL a border."
I think the title works.
> You can't cURL a border. But you can track your own state carefully enough that when the governments know the answer, so do you.
Maybe API would be a better term, but it's a clever.
Few of my relatives just went to Europe as tourists, threw away their back home tickets and went illegal. After few years they legalised and now citizens. And I'm still here, because I don't want to break the law and I don't have valid legal grounds to get the working visa. It sucks to obey the law.
This is such a common thing and tolerated you have to wonder whether it's actually immoral. I've met many people on my travels who went to Europe on tourist visas, got work and then got to stay legally later. No one was deported.
All of these were people in low-paying services industries, jobs Europeans don't usually want (waiters, cleaners, etc).
The only ones that had issues with immigration were my qualified worker friends who got a work visa and then the company had layoffs while they were there, losing their sponsorship. People with masters degrees who had to scramble to find new work in 30 days or face deportation.
It's hard not to think that's intentional.
I have a nuanced opinion because it's a rather complex subject but it's just a weird thing to have seen happen. As a tourist I had to prove up and down I wasn't going to stay there only to see no one else cares outside the airports. There's obvious wage suppression going on with these policies but these waiters and cleaners also had college degrees from good institutions, probably more qualified than some citizens.
> I've met many people on my travels who went to Europe on tourist visas, got work and then got to stay legally later.
That's completely legal for some nationalities, at least in Germany. §41 AufenthV allows people from certain countries to come to Germany and apply for a visa there.
A separate paragraph allows people to convert a tourist visa to a residence permit if the reason for the residence permit appeared while they were visiting. For example, going through rounds of interviews, and being offered the job while you're visiting Germany as a tourist.
There are so many other paths, but navigating those options can be confusing.
The problem is, that only works if your Aufenthaltsbehörde isn't swamped in case load. Unfortunately, the ones in cities where tech workers are wanted are swamped and often times you need a lawyer to file an Untätigkeitsklage (inactivity lawsuit) or threaten to do so to get them to respond.
The Ausländerbehörden are massively understaffed (well below 50% of what would be needed), and work distribution usually is that anything attached with a court deadline has absolute priority, anything from a lawyer comes next, and whatever comes from a generic person or company just gets shifted to "Ablage P" (the paper recycling bin).
You're right, but I have to say that the Berlin immigration office has greatly improved in the last two years. The wait times are getting a bit more acceptable.
The biggest challenge now is housing those newcomers. The housing situation is turning people away.
Borders of countries are fundamentally human constructs. There is no morality associated with crossing them legally or illegally. This is the difference between a law declaring something illegal because they think it is better for society (a parking ticket, say) and a law created that require moral turpitude (murder, say).
Morality is a human construct as well, so I don’t quite get your point.
Ha ha, “no morality,” when it’s people you like. You’re saying pogroms aren’t immoral? That’s a “legal” border crossing!
A country with no borders is not a country at all, merely an "economic zone" that can be leached until dry.
What is the mechanism whereby an economic zone is leached, such that borders would protect it?
I don't have hard data yet but I'm pretty sure some cities have suburbs outside them, connected via road, that rich people use as tax havens so they can live near a city without being subject to the laws and taxation of the city
Right but if you go into a country then you're in the country, not in the outskirts. You still pay taxes (generally...), and, in many countries, don't get any social services.
If anything, many formally-colonial countries are leeching off their illegal immigrants, not the other way around.
Countries are generally big and with cities on both sides of a border so that doesn't seem like it would be a big worry for them.
What do you mean by valid legal grounds? For many countries all you need is to get a local job paying above a threshold, that’s enough to get a work permit.
You need a work permit to get a job, not the other way around. If you meant a "job offer", yes you can get a work permit with a job offer, but not everybody is that lucky.
If you are on a tourist visa you can't legally get a job then worm your way to a valid work/residency visa. I mean you can, just not legally.
It varies per country, for example in the Netherlands as a software engineer and other "highly skilled" [1] roles you can get an HSM visa / work permit. I believe Germany, Denmark and others have similar programs.
This is how it works: you interview[2], get a job offer, sign it, then your employer applies for a work permit on your behalf. The only complicated part is collecting your own paperwork. You wait a few weeks/months for approval and move in. It's a lot easier than most people think. The permit is tied to your employment, though it can be transferred, but you cannot get a 'free employment' permit until after five years in the country.
For the EU as a whole, the Blue Card serves a similar purpose but is significantly more difficult to obtain.
[1] There is no skill/merit assessment like the USA, it's solely based on the salary threshold - basically delegates the skill assessment to the employer. Not every company has access to this program, the job must be advertised as including visa sponsorship.
[2] online. Flying over for a final round was common before COVID, I miss those days
+1
We hired someone from Syria as a small and newly formed company in Germany, and all we had to claim is that yes it is a high skill job above a certain salary threshold and no we cannot find a person available with the required skills in Europe. The visa application process from our side was simple and straightforward, no forms, no fees, just a short letter where they told us beforehand via phone what to write to get it accepted, and it was processed very quickly, a few weeks maybe. We didn’t even advertise the job before, it was a position/role created specifically for that person (so from that perspective there was truth behind the statement that we cannot find anyone else suitable for it.)
> You need a work permit to get a job, not the other way around
To legally get a job yes, but that tends to not be super effective at stopping people, and even if the job itself is illegal, it can count as something that links you to the society where you want to regularize your situation.
Heavy "it depends on the country" since we're talking Europe-wide here.
>You need a work permit to get a job, not the other way around
Technically yes, but actually no, because you mostly need an employer to sponsor your work permit, unless you get yourself a residence permit that is not job-related.
What might be some of the ways GP poster's family managed it?
Pretty much nobody does that in the USA (maybe by getting married? Prob not even that in Trump II), where I am. Come in an a tourist visa, stay over, manage to legalize your stay in a few years and then become a citizen. Nope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Guevara_(journalist) this guy spent about 20 years attempting to do exactly that, and was only actually caught and deported last month. In this case, the way he was attempting to get legal citizenship was by virtue of his now-adult children who he and his wife had on US soil, which makes the children legally natural-born US citizens.
I'm not against it, I'm admiring Europe if it's still possible.
Now I'm curious what countries we're talking about and what's the process of "legalisation"
My relatives naturalised in the Spain.
How does this happen? Is there a law which just gives you a citizenship if you stayed for N years?
The exact country isn't clear, it depends from country to country. Spain for example have "arraigo social", where I think if you've stayed for 3 years (illegally/legally) and can demonstrate you've ended up in some sort of "link" with Spanish society (like having a permanent job) you can apply for a "temporary residence and work permit". Once you have that, you're legal and you could apply for permanent residence and eventually citizenship, granted you fulfill those requirements.
I have a bunch of friends, with jobs ranging from bartenders to software developers, who've successfully were allowed to stay in the country after doing things that way, initially staying illegally and later regularized their situation.
Huge respect to the author for the details that have gone into this. I'd spent a week hammering at a Claude max 20x plan to try and build schengen 90/180 rolling window + tax residency in a couple of countries tracker... and that was hard work. I can only imagine how much effort has gone into this, to get all the details right.
It's unclear whether the author wrote all of this themselves, or if they outsourced a bunch of it to Claude. My experience with Claude was that it was terrible at writing code to do the math, even when I explained what the calculation needed to be, what the input was, and what the expected result was. It ultimately took starting a whole new project just to do the rolling window calculation, and then have that fed back in.
My biggest question for the author, if they happen to see this, is: how much manual testing validation did you do of the outputs the app produces? IE: Did you do the inputs + transformations = output calculations yourself as well, counting days on calendars, etc, to validate that the app is actually accurate? (That was the only way I developed any faith in solution I made for myself, which is way less impressive than your app). Regardless of whether you wrote the code yourself or not, a thorough test harness feels vitally important for an app like this.
I tend to find that for things like this that are really math heavy, it's usually better to create a DSL (or create easily readable function calls, etc) that you can easily write yourself instead of relying on AI to understand math heavy rules. Bonus points, if the rules are in an easily editable format, you can change them easily when they need to. It seems that was the path the author took...
And yes this kind of use-case is exactly where unit tests shine...
> create a DSL (or create easily readable function calls, etc)
These aren't really that different. Consider the history of the earliest (non-assembly) programming languages, particularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedcoding , as well as the ideas expressed by Lisp.
Oh yeah, that's why I added the parenthesis. I consider lisp macros to be a dsl and that's exactly what I tend to like using. Similarly with ruby and some meta programming tricks.
I do the opposite, set up everything myself in terms of architecture/design of the software, so the AI can do the boring boilerplate like "math heavy rules". Always interesting to see how differently we all use LLMs.
I've usually not been impressed in AI's implementation of math heavy rules so I wouldn't trust it much and I tend to find it easier for me to write them myself and then verify :) Yup, it's always interesting to see the different usages.
When I’ve worked on complex scheduling problems like that I use copious unit tests, they’re perfect for this kind of input->algo->output problem where algo has tons of edge cases.
Indeed, not using unit tests and instead trying to manually test all the cases sounds crazy to me!
I'm not sure I’m reading this right but are you saying that an AI made you dumber and then you complain that the AI is too dumb? That sounds like a lose-lose deal tbh.
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> that was hard work
I'm sorry. I don't want to fight here, but you have literally just said you paid Claude to do the thinking for you (except for some math), yet you're talking about this like you're some kind of scientist; or that you've done this extensive, in-depth work.
You made an AI vibe-code an app in a week and now you're impressed someone else was able to do it better?
Am I missing something? Is it maybe just your writing style that makes it come across so "from your high horse"?
This task seems like something a competent Excel user could create. I think the hard part is knowing the rules and the corner cases than any of the "math" (just addition and subtraction, surely) required.
But that’s the thing, there are no guarantees that the corner cases were actually handled correctly. Especially if it was AI coded without review by a subject matter expert.
How do you encode Gregg's sausage roll in .xls? ;)
You joke, but because it is actually possible - you have a regularly updated sheet which contains all your bank transactions (my bank will continually update a Google Sheet for me if I ask), and then you do a lookup for a Gregg's transaction on the relevant day.
I understand the sentiment, but I come to HN largely to avoid that tone in Internet commentary.
It wasn't super obvious reading the article, but the app the author made is available for anyone to download.
https://drobinin.com/apps/residency/
If I wasn't on android and decidedly sedentary at the moment, I'd love to see how it works.
I just realized this was the same author who made the apple watch integration for their gym entry system, I loved their writing then, and I loved it here!
Regarding the writing, I'm the opposite.. but I can't point out why I don't like it.
Maybe because the author is trying to sound sleek and sexy, "look at me, jetset international traveller", although the topic is so nerdy and dull, and the bragging feels off-putting to me.
(My opinion. Did I need to share it? probably not. Flag away if you think so)
No I agree, tone and context matters for technical writing too.
Digital nomads gonna digital nomad…
You've illuminated the issue for me. He's asking "What, you don't have the problem of needing to stay sweet of tax and visa regulations when you need to make a split-second decision whether you can spontaneously travel to Iceland?".
And it's not even a "sexy" problem.. it's bureaucracy!
> whether you can spontaneously travel to Iceland
on a budget.
At least this is what it triggered for me.
> Digital nomads gonna digital nomad…
People who enjoy travelling gonna travel…
I'm a PureGym member. I just memorised the 8 digit number that never changes and I input it manually. It takes seconds. I agree that the official app is garbage. I just don't want or need to get my phone out at all.
Ah, the classic programmer's mistake of treating complicated human interaction systems as a computer programs.
There is no State Almighty judging you to the last dot of absurdly complicated rules (well, in 99.99% cases when you don't actively look for trouble). Like, if you overstayed Schengen visa for one day because you messed up with counting entry and exit days, but used it otherwise for its intended purpose, the border officer likely won't even notice. Or for tax residence, a lot of countries I know just take what you say about your trips at face value - especially when there is no way to check it.
Just relax. If you don't know how to count your days in Morocco because they changed the time zone in an inconvenient moment, the officer evaluating your documents doesn't know that too. It's truth and best effort that counts.
It's absolutely not best effort that counts.
I've heard many stories of people overstaying their visa in the US by e.g. one day, by way of a mishap or honest mistake, and subsequentially being denied visas or turned away at border control. The effects of this can go on for years and years... it's basically zero tolerance
Overstaying in the US
Anywhere else, less strict. Still can be problematic yes. And of course depends on the circumstances
Its tru for Schengen visas too. Overstaying a day because of a cancelled flight is enough to deny future visas, they are very strict. It depends on the country you are applying to, and from. There are also exit requirements, like having to leave Schengen from the same country you arrived in.
hate to break it to you, but this isn't accurate
I overstayed my visa by a week in Thailand couple of decades ago because the task I was sent out to perform took longer than expected. I just had to pay a reasonable fine on exit that I then claimed back on my expenses. There was certainly not even a suggestion that I would be unwelcome in Thailand in the future.
Why is the US so awkward?
Overstaying a visa is a big deal. You should not be counting days or nights because you should not let yourself be in the country anywhere near the expiry of a visa.
Yes, this feels like calculating to the second when you need to arrive at the airport so you'll spend zero time at the airport.
Instead, arrive a bit early to the airport, and analogously, don't run visas down to the last hour based on the minutiae of Moroccan timezones etc.
> You should not be counting days or nights because you should not let yourself be in the country anywhere near the expiry of a visa.
You're privileged if you're able to do so. In many occasions people have single-entry visas with one day leeway from tickets submitted to the consulate.
For USA, A Visa is a right to request entry into the country. The I-94 defines the duration you are authorized to stay. You can have an expired Visa and time left on you I-94 and remain in the country.
>Like, if you overstayed Schengen visa for one day because you messed up with counting entry and exit days, but used it otherwise for its intended purpose, the border officer likely won't even notice.
When that wasn't automated that might have been the case (not that its a good thing).
It's certainly not the case now that there is literally an API that tracks that.
Enforcement is arbitrary and vibes based, but only if you broke a rule. If you didn't break a rule they find it much harder to punish you, no matter what the vibes are. But also if you have good vibes you might not get punished no matter what rules you broke.
That's all true until there's a dispute. Being relaxed about these things is a very bad idea if the consequences are potentially severe.
This made me appriciate the amount of visa-free travel my passport allows me on a whole new level. Figuiring these things out seems possible, but so inefficient and time consuming.
It’s not just that. I’m about 1/3 in one country, 1/3 in another one, and 1/3 in others, with income from multiple countries… I pay all my taxes (even more than I should), but hell, I won’t make the paper trail completely clean, because there is pain there. A lot. Tax authorities are utterly incompatible with each other.
There's some similarity between nationality and copyright: arcane, obscure, complex and mean rules that only benefit incumbents and punish everyone else.
I hope we will eventually get rid of both.
At the rate things are going, even EU and Schengen, areas in which their citizens are blissfully unaware how nice they have it compared to outsiders, are going to come to an end. Far-right nationalists are on the rise over Europe.
The European far right are not exactly fans of the EU, but on the whole they are much more concerned about immigrants from low-trust Muslim societies than from EU countries (high-trust "Christian" societies)
Yes, immigration is the primary outward goal of the european far right. But the european far right has the common goal of stopping the EU from growing closer. I'd argue the far right is working together in the EU to destabilise it, similar to how other authoritarian countries are working together to destabilise the rest of the world to their advantage. The saying "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" comes to mind.
They just lost ground in the Netherlands, losing about 1/3 of their voters from last time (down from 24% to 17%)
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I like your optimism, but this is likely an outlier. Any little mistake the sitting governments are making will push the far-right to new highs, and there is no reason to believe there won't be mistakes. There will be plenty. So, that's the fuel that keeps coming.
Now you need a lighter to set this all on fire, and we can see it grow in front of our eyes. The bigger the AI bubble grows, the more it will all come crashing down, and the next economic crisis will find all the EU countries (and not just those) ready for a far-right takeover. It's just a matter of time.
In the U.K. the far right are polling 30%. In a sane election system this wouldn’t deliver a landslide
In PR countries the populist right tends to be about 30% - France, Italy, or lower (29% Sweden, 15% Poland)
I don’t think it’s inevitable, but something has to change. Europe can’t take a billion extra immigrants from climate migration, even if they integrated.
Wealth disparity is ballooning, with fewer people owning more and more, and that’s likely to snowball in the next 20 years as the wealthiest keep accumulating and power shifts more to weary and away from work.
It doesn't even take the far right winning to unravel the EU. Both France and Germany, the economic pillars of the EU are facing massive budget challenges due to aging populations, high energy costs and trade
Though Germany and France are essentially the pillars of the EU. That's where it started and as long as the far right doesn't make it to the steering wheel, they will keep it that way.
Do you dislike copyright also when it protects your intellectual property, and makes things like software licenses possible?
Yes, I do. I think the world would be a better place if there were no Microsoft, Adobe or Oracle. We would still have OSes and databases, we would be fine.
If I couldn't use the AGPL to force Amazon to release Elasticsearch, but they couldn't use normal copyright to force me not to reverse engineer Alexa and Widevine, would it be that bad?
It wouldn't be bad. We have more than enough resources to reverse engineer most software, yet we're restricted by arcane EULAs and DRM.
And so much "FOSS" is MIT anyway. Abolishing copyright would make literally no difference to MIT-licensed software.
There's hundreds of millions of starving people ready to move to the first country that does it.
Let them!
I often wonder what the world would look like if humans could fly like birds. There would be cages everywhere.
This is an impressive article, & is incidentally why every sane set of rules has administrative discretion in its enforcement
Why is it that when I travel to certain places I need to ensure my passport has at least n months before it expires? So what if it's due to expire next week if I'm only staying until next week. Even if I'm staying 2 weeks and it expires tomorrow, why does that matter? I guess I might not be allowed back into my home country, but that should be my concern, not the worry of the immigration of the country I am going to.
What kind of illegal immigration / criminal activity does a country prevent, or economic benefit / any other advantage does a country get by enforcing this kind of rule?
My guess is that it's because of emergencies. If you get injured and can't or shouldn't fly home then you need more time on your passport. It is also much easier to send you home if you over stay your visa if your passport is still valid. Also the system is setup to give you a visa of a specific length (eg 30 days), they can't just give you a 2 day visa.
Also if your passport lasts for 10 years you've known when it's going to expire for quite a while, they're just expecting you to be responsible.
It's a risk mitigation measure. The three or six month requirement usually comes from how long you could stay, not how long you do stay.
You are also assuming a point-to-point trip. While a citizen of a country usually cannot be denied entry to their own country, any countries you transit are under no obligation to allow you through on an expired passport.
tl;dr filters out people who may be problematic to deport.
Once you've lived in a few countries you start to see how silly their little rules are. Once you are asking cross jurisdictional questions there is nobody who can give you a correct answer, its all guesswork.
It's fascinating that cURL is becoming a genericized term:
- search it on a search engine -> google it
- fetch it from an API -> cURL it
"curl it" has been a common (tech) term for at least 15 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&que...
If you're trying to engineer loopholes out of citizenship laws, you're going to get yourself pulled aside.
The whole point of these arbitrary rules is entirely to make this sort of shenanigans impossible but to let in people who are using the system for the purpose it was designed.
That's why the rule about 'relevant to your travel' is vague. So that you can't weasel your way through it.
People who write this sort of app think border entry is two doors, allowed and denied. But there's also the guard who stabs people who ask awkward questions and their name is 'National Security'.
No, it sounds like the author is well aware of that, and is instead just trying to get a read on what the gov's various systems are saying about him, so he can stay well within buffers of that.
He explicitly says that none of his data on the app would convince an official.
The point is - while all of these systems are fuzzy at the edges, that is not a bug. Letting people reside in a few countries at the same time, and to pick a tax residency like a new winter jacket is a non-objective for the border, tax and residency systems.
It's actually relatively simple to follow the rules that lead you down the well estabilished residency paths if you do the opposite of what the article suggests and leave enough of a buffer for every required number, so you don't need to think about it and the precise count can be handwaved by the officials.
Conversly, if you try to minmax the rules, you might find that most important systems still have an arbitrary human decision maker, who simply decides whether to apply a complex ruleset to the letter, or to be lenient.
> No, it sounds like the author is well aware of that, and is instead just trying to get a read on what the gov's various systems are saying about him, so he can stay well within buffers of that.
You don't need an app for that. You just behave like a normal person.
> You just behave like a normal person.
?? I'm a normal person, and I don't need to count my days in and out of a country, I just take vacations when I like.
If OP did that, they'd lose their visa.
It sounds like you've never known anyone on a green card, or waiting for citizenship, or on a visa that requires a certain number of days in the country.
> To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago.
This is an insane bureaucratic requirement (to have been in the country exactly 5 years on the day prior), and not someone the vast majority of people need to worry about. How does "just behave like a normal person" help keep you on the right side of multiple overlapping Kafkaesque requirements?
Hard disagree. You accidentally break an immigration rule, you face the consequences (if you get caught and the officer is not letting it slide).
No amount of "behaving like a normal person" (whatever that means) is going to save you in that situation.
He's not trying to engineer loopholes. He's trying to comply precisely. You are right that there are some genuinely squishy things, but not all of them are. Tax residency is not a judgement call. Overstaying visas or visa waivers is not a judgement call. Residency requirements for immigration applications. etc
> He's trying to comply precisely.
Which is entirely what the laws are trying to stop you doing.
Governments don't want you to be 'just inside', they want you to be well inside.
The number is, for example 159 days in a tax year not because they are happy if you're there 160 days but because they had to draw a line somewhere because text is necessarily precise.
Unless you're rich, of course.
> ten years of travel history, down to the day
FWIW I have been asked for this a couple of times and I always just included the transits that were stamped in my current passport. Maybe I got lucky but I got away with it...
You've been lucky in that the countries you've travelled to all stamped your passport.
This gets much murkier in the EU, or being a non-citizen with Global Entry traveling to the US, etc.
To get a driving license in Japan without having to retake the exam, I had to prove that I lived in the country that issued my license for at least 90 days after I got it (presumably because they had some issues with people getting licenses in jurisdictions that are... easier to get the licenses in.).
This was a _very_ non-trivial thing to do for a document I first got over ten years ago, in a country that is part of the Schengen zone.
No that's what I meant - I just didn't report the countries that didn't stamp my passport. To report dates of entry and exit of every country I've visited would be impossible, I don't think I have that information at all. Quite likely in many cases nobody does.
But yeah I think the place where I got lucky is that nobody ever checked.
> I couldn't find any legit reasons for keeping the "six-month rule" around but it seems like it's still occasionally checked, sometimes even during boarding.
Airlines sometimes check for things during boarding. Those things are never rules outside the context of the airline.
I had an airline require once that I complete a form before boarding that, by the terms printed on the form, expired before the plane landed. That didn't matter to them.
Airlines are clueless. I don't know why they do their imaginary checks.
> Airlines sometimes check for things during boarding. Those things are never rules outside the context of the airline.
Nope. Plenty of countries still require 6 months' passport validity to enter.
> I had an airline require once that I complete a form before boarding that, by the terms printed on the form, expired before the plane landed. That didn't matter to them.
> Airlines are clueless. I don't know why they do their imaginary checks.
The airline doesn't give a shit about whether you can legally or practically enter the country they're flying you to. They care about whether they're going to be held liable to repatriate you at their own expense, and their processes are set up to ensure they avoid that. If the requirement on them is that they check your document before you board, they'll check your document before you board.
Amusingly this appears to block access from the UK. https://archive.ph/pBmlV
I don't travel internationally. This all sounds like a nightmare, and I'm glad it doesn't affect me.
I travel internationally. These arcane rules also do not affect me.
Me: Lifelong, native-born citizen of a western nation. 1 or 2 international trips of less than 2 weeks each year.
Author: Immigrant to his country of residence. Applying or soon to apply for citizenship or permanent residency. Has taken multiple, lengthy international trips and also appears to have had immigration status in different countries .
Conclusion: If you are more like me than the author then international travel will not require navigation of arcane and contradictory rules.
My favourite is the Norway visa application. It says you have to bring along a confirmed flight ticket. But it also tells you that you shouldn’t pay for your tickets till you have the visa. Oh sure, dude. I’ll just tell the airline to hold it for me while I wait 60 days for you to make a decision.
>The app is local by default. [...] Being local also means no liability. Personal immigration history is exactly the kind of data governments might want.
That doesn't seem to be a great argument in favour of crossing borders with this information stored locally on your device.
>Keeping it off my servers means nobody can demand I hand it over.
I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that this is completely false.
[Edit] On second reading, I realise that he's just talking about him not being able to hand over the data. This is true. But the user can be forced to hand it over. So I retract that it's completely false, but it's still a very bad idea.
If I was concerned about this sort of thing when travelling, the only sensitive thing I would carry is a password in my head that grants me access to end-to-end encrypted data on some server.
You're correct. They're assuming that they might be served with a subpoena or warrant or something, but US Customs officials can and will demand the passwords to your personal devices or coerce you into giving your biometrics
This is the kind of app I wouldn't believe could actually exist. Human rules are just so painfully complex and unwilling to agree with the concept of consistency.
Insanely impressive that it works even just well enough that more than just the developer finds use in it.
Great post! Reminds me of (UK) Passport Application game: https://jameshaydon.github.io/passport/
It seems that it has become quite popular that images don't expand anymore, when clicking on them. One needs to use the context menu "open in new tab" to get a properly readable image. Why?
I’d say that’s pretty good behavior. It used to be common that images would expand in ways that would not allow you to zoom in mobile devices but also not allow you to open the image directly
I wonder if this is something that could be built on top of Google location tracking. Presumably there's not enough info there by itself, but basic time/position data should be sufficient.
In the US you can just book the error fare immediately and then sort out whether you can take it. You have 24 hours by law to get a refund for any airline ticket.
that was fascinating; I didn’t realize border requirements were that complicated.
Working at a company in Norway hiring lots of internationals, I've heard so many stories. I'm myself born here, but to foreign (EU) parents. Getting a citizenship for me was quite "easy" (in the sense that I didn't have to do anything or be at someone's mercy, just had to apply), but still lots of bureaucracy. For instance, I had to order a transcript from the police saying that I hadn't committed certain crimes. This document I would have to bring to my appointment for citizenship at the police station. But the document had a short expiration date, and didn't know how long it would take to obtain or not when my appointment would be. So it's a gamble if you hit the timing, shrugs. I think however they now just pull up the records themselves instead of doing this weird dance.
One coworker had lived her for many years on a string of temporary working visas. He was then eligible for a permanent one, and applied. However, while that was processing, he kinda was in limbo. Still legal to live and work here, but somehow wasn't guaranteed entry if he were to leave for a vacation / visit his home country/family. I don't know the exact details, but so weird how he suddenly was stuck here for months, with many delays. In the end he needed to travel for work, and our company sent a letter and his application got fast tracked.
My country just had a minister appointed who's sole mission is to spearhead a system that no government agency can demand from you a document that belongs to any other government agency, so long as you authorize both agencies to talk to each other for the purpose.
Now try international taxation rules (particularly if you come from one of the handful of countries with world-wide taxation, like the USA!)
It grows exponentially the more countries are involved. I am a citizen of country A but live and work in country B, and I have to satisfy country B's visa requirements, which involves quite a bit of paperwork. I also have to pay taxes to country A, which involves more paperwork. It gets complicated.
But I'm only dealing with the requirements of two countries. The author mentioned five or six countries; I'm glad I'm only dealing with two.
I’ve never worked in 2 countries but there are many countries that have DTA (https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/international-tax/internationa...) so theoretically you only pay taxes to one country at a time, wouldn’t it be simpler?
If you are a US citizen, US taxes you on your worldwide income, so you have to file regardless of where you live. And filing in the US is the actual burden, not the taxes themselves — inscrutable tax law and byzantine forms mean that you can't file yourself (you pay tax-filing companies to do that for you) and your tax returns easily reach hundreds of pages.
US screws its expats in a big way.
The club of countries that do this includes: United States, Eritrea and Myanmar.
The thing is, only the US can realistically know your worldwide income. And only due to its banking cronies it intimidates into submission worldwide.
I still have to submit the paperwork that says which country my income was earned in, which is basically the standard tax paperwork from country A plus an extra form or two. (And in years when I went to country A on business trips, it's non-trivial. Simple enough, but not as trivial as years when I was in country B the whole time). It's not extremely burdensome, but it's still one more piece of paperwork to keep track of than the tax paperwork that people who have never left country A have to deal with.
This typically means they agree you don't get double charged (so you can claim taxes paid in one back in the other) but they both still want you to complete the paperwork regardless. Saves money, not time.
Don't get double-taxed on income, specifically. You may still get double-taxed on investments, property, wealth, etc depending on which pair of countries
When I moved from country A to country B, I shipped quite a lot of stuff (books, board games, etc) that was too heavy to take on the airplane and which I could live without for a month or two. Country B did not charge me customs duties on my books, but did charge me customs duties on my board games; I think they must have looked at how many I had and thought "There's no way this is personal possessions, he's bringing this into the country to sell them." I decided not to argue with them about it, so I got double-taxed on some of my property (sales tax on it in country A when I bought those games, then customs duties in country B years later).
P.S. My collection of board games is not particularly impressive for a board gamer: it's in the double digits, but not in the triple digits. I know some board gamers with far more games than I have.
> I am a citizen of country A but live and work in country B [...] I also have to pay taxes to country A, which involves more paperwork.
Isn't that the case only when country A is the USA? AFAIK, nearly all countries in the world tax only residents, not citizens, so in most cases you'd only have to fill tax paperwork (and pay taxes) for country B.
Only if you're only talking about income from work. If you own property in country A which you rent out while you live & work in country B, then you probably still owe tax on that rental income in country A. (but it will depend on the exact wording of the relevant DTA if one exists)
And since you are now filling in two tax returns for different countries, with different tax allowances across rental income and work income which interact in decidedly non-linear fashion, you probably need to make sure both country A and B have no confusion about where your work income was earned.
Having spent the last 8 years obsessively counting days across the UK and Finland (and every other country I have visited) exactly to account for this scenario, I am very sympathetic to attempts to solve this problem space!
> If you own property in country A [...]
But then, that's because you own property in country A, not because you're a citizen of country A! The same would happen if you were a citizen of country B, lived and worked in country B, but bought a house to rent out in country A.
The more you travel (or immigrate) the more you realise the government probably needs less money than it gets, just better spent.
Which government?
every government.
Waste is inevitable.
Look, I actually like that my municipality pays a salary to city ecoligist that makes sure, the sparrows living in a bushes dont get disrupted too much when new train tracks are laid down
Yeah I mean this is why regulations are hard. Someone's "this is an important environmental concern" is another person's "anti-growth NIMBYism"
You have a point -- if nimbysts had their way, the whole place would not even exist, as the referendum rejected it. On the other hand, when there is such a person making sure that environmental concerns are addressed, it turns nimbysm from a roadblock to a stakeholder.
In the end the sparrows got their bushes and we got our train and the bridge has a place for bats to nest and all that.
Then you agree that whatever replaces it will be wasteful too
> This time, I tried to learn from that: facts are stored as instants, reasoning happens in local days of the jurisdiction that cares.
I think that's how the JavaScript Temporal proposal works. Convert your instant to the timezone, make the comparisons/calculations, hope you didn't jump an hour due to summertime, convert back.
Am I correct in understanding that this App does not include any built in understanding of the rules that you must comply with? It looks like you have to "create a goal" in which you encode your own understanding of the rules you must comply with and the app then checks that against your travel log
ive had to deal with a fair share of this messy time logic, and ive found this library really useful
if you cant express it with the tools it gives you, it generally means youre making unsafe assumptions
It's a cool app, and makes me wish that Australian tax residency rules were actually computable.
The problem with those rules is that they "all make sense" somewhat (and where details might have been influenced by local idiosyncrasies) locally but if you mix and match them then it gets weird
But the trick here is: if you're relying on the details for your benefit then make 100% sure it's provable (though tbh legal proof is less - and different - than what your HN commenter might understand). Or just make it easy on yourself and don't rely on them
What is the app shown in the screenshot in the article that displays a flight price?
I cant afford having this problem
nice app ! definitely is needed for many in this brave new world we are living in, so many things to keep track of..
I live in the country I was born in and whilst I do travel it's mostly holidays and then if abroad at most once a year for less than 2 weeks. I have no idea what half of the stuff the article is talking about and less about what the app solves. I can only assume it's something so far out of my frame of reference I'm completely ignorant... I don't get it.
Who's gonna tell him?
Dont spoil the fun pls
That's no travel, that's transfers between cells on a prison planet.
Europe in a nutshell
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They can also introduce a law that says something akin to 'deliberately skirting minimum requirements is grounds for removal' to kill this sort of shenanigans.
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Are you always this cynical? The article is interesting on its own merits, that the author is also selling the app (outright, I might add, not subscription-based!) is neither here nor there
You'd think so, but there's always people complainers that something is an ad. It just happened to be my turn. Mostly because the type of person who would complain that something is an ad and raise a fuss wouldn't complain about this one, and was feeling like pointing out that hypocrisy. Unfortunately I didn't strike the exact right tone for the peanut gallery. Maybe I'll have better luck next time!
"Unfortunately I didn't strike the exact right tone for the peanut gallery"
Right tone depends on site. "Smug + cynical" could be a great fit on X or Reddit, but HN isn't really built around this sort of discourse.
I can't tell if this comment is actually serious. This place is often smugger and more cynical than Reddit, which says a lot.
What late stage capitalism? This is literally some guy hacking some stuff together.
Having to rely on "some guy hacking some stuff together", in 2025 to avoid accidentally violating visa or tax or some other bureaucratic minutia when there's many governmental bodies/organizations that should have be doing that work since before the Internet even existed seems just totally fine to you? How is this not a free app from some department of the UN? Probably more complicated than "because free apps don't make money", but that is something that late stage capitalism abhors.
I'm not trying to tear down this guy's work, it's a great bit of writing, both English and code, and I'm okay with that pricing model.
What happens when he gets something wrong, simply gets tired of it, or retires, or there's a bus incident?
Yeah... this site is 1000 more late-stage capitalism than that guy.
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