The Schengen area shared by the 27 E.U. member states opens its borders to the outside world on July 1st, for the first time since mid-March when Europe was the world epicenter of contagion of the coronavirus pandemic. However, they could not yet allow travelers from most Latin American countries or the United States to enter their territories.
The permanent representatives of each country in the bloc approved a list of 15 nations outside the common territory for whose travelers entry will be permitted beginning in July. Uruguay and Canada are the only unrestricted countries in the Americas. Travelers from the United States and Brazil are still vetoed in this first round. They are precisely the two countries in the world with the most infections and deaths from the coronavirus.
The list of 15 countries also includes Algeria, Australia, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Rwanda, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia and China.
According to RTVE.es, Latin America currently concentrates 25% of the world’s cases and “the contagion curve continues to climb.”
Various media outlets agree that the criterion for approving this list is epidemiological. The countries that are allowed to enter the Schengen area must have a similar or lower rate of infections than the E.U. during 14 days. The E.U. ratio of infections currently ranges from 16 to 20 infections per 100,000 inhabitants, according to eldiario.es and RTVE.es
The other criterion for doing the list was that of reciprocity, Nacho Alarcón reports for El Confidencial. Countries that keep entry to E.U. travellers blocked are responded to with a veto. China is on the list of the 15 waiting for it to reopen its borders to Europeans, something it has agreed to, Alarcón informs.
However, Bernardo de Miguel writes for El País: “This criterion has also been applied with quite arbitrary discretion. While opening up to China is subject to reciprocity, the same criterion does not seem to apply to countries like Algeria, which keep their borders closed.”
The list of the 15 countries the E.U. calls “safe” came out of an intense debate that lasted for days and intensified over the weekend. According to Euronews, there was disagreement between the ambassadors to the E.U. over the reliability of the data on the rates of coronavirus infection in some countries. In addition, Spain wanted to include more Latin American nations because of their cultural links, while other member states wanted to include others “important to them”, El Confidencial’s correspondent reports.
However, Bernardo de Miguel reports on political debate too: “The decision to allow entry or not, apparently technical and objective, has been full of political debate and has left out numerous Latin American or African countries which, on paper, meet the scale of contagion.”
The E.U. will revise the list of 15 countries every two weeks to expand or restrict it, depending on their epidemiological evolution.
The veto is not binding, but a recommendation. Each member country is free to implement it or not. For this reason, the list of 15 “does not guarantee the entry [to the territory of the European Union] of the selected countries,” El País’s de Miguel writes.
According to a report by Matina Stevis-Gridneff for The New York Times, although the E.U. cannot force its 27 members to prevent entry to the nations on the list, European officials consulted by her “warn that failure warn of any of the 27 members to stick to it could lead to the reintroduction of borders within the bloc.”
“The reason this exercise is additionally complex for Europe is that, if internal borders are open but member states don’t honor the same rules, visitors from nonapproved nations could land in one European country, and then jump onward to other E.U. nations undetected,” the journalist writes.
Europe is opening their borders at the beginning of summer and after, with greater control of the pandemic, its countries are progressively coming out of confinement and restarting their activities.
Nacho Alarcón reports that European tourism “has suffered a huge shock” from the pandemic and the closure of its borders. This sector pressed, he reports, for the debate of the E.U. member countries. According to the European statistics center Eurostat, one in ten companies in Europe’s non-financial economy belongs to the tourism industry. They employ 9.5% of the total number of people employed in the entire non-financial economy and 21.7% of the entire service sector.
The most recent Eurostat data from 2018, quoted by El País’s Bernardo de Miguel, show that 168 million travellers from outside the E.U. entered its territory. Another Eurostat article says that in the same year Spain was the most common destination for tourists from abroad, with 301 million nights spent in tourist accommodations, which is almost 23% of the entire overnight stays in the E.U. With Italy and France, Spain completed half of the overnight stays of foreign visitors in the entire block.
Among those millions of travelers there are U.S. residents and citizens who also travel to Europe on business, Stevis-Gridneff reports, “given the enormous economic ties between the United States and the E.U.”