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Comment by nirbheek | Hacker News Reader

Very strange that this is your experience, because IME as an Indian who has to apply for Schengen visas 4-5 times a year it's actually easier to get a visa for tourism than to attend a conference or for business.

You need to supply fewer documents for a tourist visa, there's lesser scrutiny, and in many countries you're more likely to get a longer-duration visa (6 months rather than exact duration) for tourism than for a conference or business.

I have been denied a visa to attend business meetings in a Schengen country despite an explicit invitation from the concerned company registered in that country simply because the consulate couldn't believe that the meetings were scheduled over the span of ten days.

They wouldn't even blink at a tourist visa for the same duration.

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This is not always true and depends on things like other visas on your passport, how often do you travel abroad and so on. For people who are traveling for the first time outside India compared to those who have other first world country stamps things can be very different. The first time I visited Germany from India (with an invite from a university there), I got an exactly 6 day multiple entry visa which might have landed me in trouble even if my flight was delayed by over 3 hours. The next time when I visited the consulate with a B1 visa for US and a visa for UK, they were apologetic about asking me to come to the consulate and returned the visa fees saying you are our guest and gave a 3 month visa.

Very interesting to know, thanks. Let me then ask: if getting a tourist visa is simpler, is there any problem in asking for a tourist visa even if your intention is attending a conference?

Yes, there are two problems:

1. You are misrepresenting the purpose of your visit and you can get deported and/or barred from entering the country. For example, you can be stopped and asked for your passport at any time (this has happened to me multiple times, even though technically it's against Schengen rules).

2. Visiting for 2-3 days makes sense for a conference, but it makes no sense for a vacation and you will raise flags. This would lead to a request for more information from the consulate plus a delay then a rejection, or just a straight rejection.

The dumbest thing is that all this friction is completely unnecessary. The EU can copy the homework of other countries mentioned by the author of the post, but are unable to for unfathomable bureaucratic reasons.

Yes, I got caught out for misrepresenting my reason for visiting Canada once. My UK company provided tech support to UK government organisations and routinely sent people to Canada as part of this contract. All fine. They then sent me out to provide similar support to a Canadian govt org with the paperwork they provided to people attending conferences or sales meetings, etc. The immigration officers spotted the difference when they asked me a couple of simple questions that I answered naively. I was threatened with arrest and deportation unless I presented with the correct docs in 24 hours. It took me three days to get the right paperwork from the guys back home but because I was obviously a clueless techie being messed around by corporate the immigration people were okay with this.

(replying to myself because it’s too late to edit)

I just wanted to add that the whole experience was massively stressful and gave me much greater awareness of the challenges faced by people who can’t cross borders easily. I was given the 24 ultimatum when I arrived in Canada which was late on Sunday afternoon UK time. Luckily I had the mobile number of a very dynamic departmental director who was staggered that corporate had totally misunderstood the circumstances of my trip. He kicked some ass to make things happen and I was home and dry, although I didn’t know it at the time. My customers (the Canadian Army, bless them) were also very understanding and put up with my slightly ragged sleep-deprived performance resulting from lengthy phone calls to corporate lawyers in the middle of the night, Canadian time. They introduced me to a senior military stakeholder I had to brief as the ‘criminal software architect’ which was actually a superb icebreaker.

But my heart goes out to people who don’t have this sort of support.

>Visiting for 2-3 days //

Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes.

Can you not go to a conference when in holiday? Isn't the difference who is paying - if you pay then it's a holiday, if work pays then it's business. Could work just give you a bonus to cover the amount at some later point?

What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel for tourism?

> Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes.

Presumably to nearby countries, not via 12-15h flights with layovers, and not after an onerous visa process?

I think you underestimate how much work is needed to submit a visa application. No one in their right mind would spend several days preparing documents and traveling for a total of 30 hours for just a 3 day holiday.

> Can you not go to a conference when in holiday? Isn't the difference who is paying - if you pay then it's a holiday, if work pays then it's business

The difference is "what is the primary purpose of your visit".

There are no clear rules around this, but for Schengen countries generally you decide based on the day spent on each (because that's how you must decide which country to apply to as well, when doing a multi-country trip).

I am visiting Europe this year: attending a conference for 5 days and on holiday for two weeks. My primary purpose is tourism.

If it was 5 days of conference and 4 days of holiday, I would have to submit the application with the conference being the primary purpose, and classified as a business visitor visa.

> What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel for tourism?

No idea, you'd have to ask the consulates.

> Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes.

Maybe to the Costa Del Sol, but not the lovely city of Melbourne.

The overhead of flying from India to Europe makes a 2-3 day holiday pretty unlikely. The flights depart in the middle of the night, and then there is jet lag.

> Can you not go to a conference when in holiday?

That is immigration fraud. If you’re a white Australian coming to the UK and doing that I seriously doubt there will be any negative consequence (source: an unofficial comment during an unfortunate visit to the Home Office). People in other situations may not fare as well.

> That is immigration fraud. If you’re a white Australian coming to the UK and doing that I seriously doubt there will be any negative consequence (source: an unofficial comment during an unfortunate visit to the Home Office). People in other situations may not fare as well.

Speaking of Australia, it isn’t clear to me at all if the e-visa Americans have to apply for to visit covers conferences or not. It is weird that Americans require a visa to Australia for a short visit (we don’t have a visa waiver agreement for some odd reason), but at least they make it easy, but if it involves a conference…well, I didn’t look into the e-visa terms very closely on my last visit, and very well could have violated visa terms.

>What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel for tourism?

Many countries don't draw the distinction at least for people with the right passport. But to the degree there's a real rationale (beyond possibly charging more for a business visa and red tape), it's probably something along the lines of the boundaries between routine business travel in another country and working in that country are blurrier than in the case of tourism and therefore some countries think it should attract more scrutiny.

You're right that I could (and have) attended tech events on my own time and my own dime and that seems like tourism by any reasonable definition but does that fact that I didn't take vacation time and maybe submitted an expense report really fundamentally change that?

> Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes.

In Europe with a 1-3 hour time difference and a 1-4 hour flight, yes.

In New York with a 5-hour time difference and an 8-hour flight, not so common. I'm sure that it happens, but it's not at all common. Jetlag alone would make that an athletic event, if your "leaving front door, returning back to front door" time is under 72 hours.

I'm not saying you're wrong and that I'd do that. But I've seen many travel agencies offer "New York weekend" package deals here in France. If they're doing that, I assume enough people take them up on it.

Long weekends in NY aren’t that uncommon from the UK

I remember at one point seeing ads in Boston for Icelandair that pretty clearly implied you might go to Iceland for a long weekend. It seemed a bit preposterous, but I was in Boston for just a couple days from San Francisco, and Iceland is actually closer to Boston than San Francisco is. And in the summer the Boston - Reykjavik time difference is only four hours.

If you google "long weekend in Iceland" there are articles (https://www.travelandleisure.com/weekend-getaways/long-weeke..., https://inspiralized.com/lifestyle/a-long-weekend-trip-to-ic...) that suggest doing this. It actually sounds not unreasonable if you can manage to power through that first day.

Not nearly as common as long weekends in Paris, Spain, Italy, etc.

Now extrapolate that to "long weekend in California." and it's again much less common.

IANAL, but I think this would very much qualify as misrepresenting the purpose of the trip.

In addition to the legality issues that others have brought up, I have been asked questions about the details of my trip, which might be intended to weed out people doing the sort of thing you're asking about.

"Which hotel are you staying at?"

"Do you have an itinerary? Can I see it?"

"Why are you coming here?" (With a weird intonation of something like, why would anyone come here to vacation? It's so boring here!")

"What do you plan on doing while you're here?"

"Are you meeting anyone?"

"How do you plan to get back?"

Etc.

I think more often than not, the people asking probably don't even care about what your actual answer is, but want to see how you react to those questions, and if the answers make basic logical sense. I.e. "I'm vacationing for 2 weeks, but don't have a hotel.", or "I'm meeting friends and family at my vacation house, but I have never been here before."

A person might not remember the address of their hotel for example, but they'll be able to give a general description without freaking out, "It's a Hilton in Albany, I don't remember which." I would imagine that they're trying to distinguish between the natural nervousness that people have with interacting with border guards, vs people who are trying to do various illegal activities.

As a fun little sidenote:

I actually got tripped up by a guard one time because he asked a weirdly phrased question, "Is this your vehicle?" I took that to mean, "Is this vehicle stolen?", so I told him "Yes, it is mine." (...because I had paid to rent it). He asked why the plates didn't match my drivers license. I explained that it was a rental, and he got very angry and said, "Well I guess it isn't YOURS then, huh!?"

I didn't realize you could answer "Rental" to strictly Yes or No question! It was such a weird way of phrasing the question, because if I were to say, "No, this isn't my vehicle." the logical follow-up question would have been, "Why are you driving someone else's vehicle? Where are they? Why aren't they driving it!?"

For what it's worth, a common technique in those sorts of scenarios is that the questions asked don't really matter, what they are looking for is nervousness and evasive behavior. Don't read too much into why are they asking a specific question; they mostly want you to talk to gauge your mental state, with the idea that many people get nervous if they're committing a crime and made to talk to authority.

When you arrive to another country's border you need to state the purpose of your visit to a border control officer. If you say "conference" - you may not be allowed in because your visa is for another purpose, if you say "tourism" you lie to a government officer, which may result in various penalties according to the local laws.

I have a question. How does "break local laws" work?

I applied to a tourism Visa in say Netherlands or uk for 2 weeks.

After 5 days, I attend a "conference" of say 2 hours or something. Is it like the man in the suit sends a call to the home ministry who sends a Hollywood style swat team or the American ice agents to drag you out of the border ?

More like someone processing your next visa application getting automatically collected data on your previous visits from all kinds of sources public and private and seeing that you lied about your visit the last time.

What sources would keep track of foreigners doing private business meetings and conferences?

Clearview[1] is not shy about selling its facial recognition services to government agencies and continues to scrape social media for photographs. It is within the realm of possibility that the foreign service officer who issues visas may query a Clearview product for photos of a visa applicant, and get a detailed picture (ha!) about the subjects activities at a conference while they were on a tourist visa.

1. https://www.clearview.ai/

Some of this is also a question of "do you want to take the risk of having an indelible black mark in your travel history?"

As an example, the US asks for your travel history (where you went and why) and a list of your social media accounts. It would be trivial to correlate a conference related social media post with a stated reason of tourism and flat that.

They might not do this, but I certainly would not want to jeopardise all future travel for that if.

Social media posts (not just from yourself but other attendees), credit card purchases, license plate scanners, the conference itself publishing the list of attendees etc. If someone you have not told knows where you had been then the government can know too. It's not guaranteed but the risk is unacceptable to some.

In Russia, the FSB monitors all attendees of conferences. If you attend a conference in Russia while on a tourist visa, the police will come up to you and force you to sign a police report that you have done wrong, and possibly pay a fine. I know that from firsthand experience. I would imagine that the situation is similar in China, Vietnam, Egypt, and other authoritarian states.

> is there any problem in asking for a tourist visa even if your intention is attending a conference?

In the U.S.A., lying on a government form is illegal, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001. I can't imagine other countries treating that differently.

That would explain the "are you a terrorist?" forms I've heard they're asking people to fill in on their flights to the US.

That's actually precisely the reason. [1] It's not always easily possible to arrest somebody for having been or even being a terrorist abroad, but you can definitely arrest them for lying on their visa application papers.

[1]: Well, probably. The Department of Homeland Security doesn't give an official reason: "The Department of Homeland Security did not explain the reason for this question, and it is not clear why any terrorist, spy, saboteur or mass murderer would answer “yes.” Doing so, whether or not by mistake, does not mean that the person will be banned from the United States, but it doesn’t help." (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/world/europe/terrorist-qu...)

For the same reason that it is easier to arrest drug dealers, pimps, mafia dons, etc… on tax evasion charges than the more immediate crimes they committed.

Is it necessarily lying?

If you go to a conference for a hobby that's tourism, right?

Very few people speak at conferences as a hobby. Even fewer speak at conferences as hobby about things they get paid for. Even fewer would be legitimately willing to do this if it included an expensive middle-of-the-night flight, jet lag, and a Visa application process.

I've done it. Of course, I didn't travel internationally just for the conference and I didn't need a visa, but I've attended tech conferences on my own--including speaking. Why not? And how many Europeans who attend FOSDEM or Americans who attend Flock (admittedly a lower bar than traveling internationally) are doing so on their own?

ADDED: And people with hobbies/interests like, say, medieval history absolutely will attend a conference/event as part of a vacation even if it has zero connection to a day job.

Generally, when you apply for a visa, there's documentation guiding you towards the correct type of visa based on purpose of visit. Everything I've seen buckets conferences under "business visa".

> If you go to a conference for a hobby that's tourism, right?

That's exactly what I was told (as a statement, not as a question) by an official a few years ago when applying for a visa for a trip to Germany.

I know governments aren't always commonsensical but it would seem odd if someone (not in the business) would need a business visa to attend Comic-Con or similar.

That changes the parameters of the hypothetical. Your original hypothetical was explicitly about misrepresenting the purpose of one's visit to a country, which one should not do because that's illegal. *OBVIOUSLY*.

Whether attending a conference for a hobby counts as a vacation trip or a business trip would be a question for the destination country's consular affairs office.

Assuming the country in question requires an explicit business visa for you as an $X citizen to attend a conference, it's probably not a good idea to lie--even though you also probably won't get caught. (Many countries don't draw a distinction between tourism and a routine business trip or some combination thereof for at least some passports however.)

(And as the sibling comment notes, if you're just dropping in for a quick conference and heading home again, that probably is suspicious as a tourist.)

This was my first question

On the basis of almost zero relevant knowledge, I would guess that if the conference is paying you to speak (or to do anything else), you'll be in violation of local law, but otherwise you're fine.

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