Borders Up

Three decades of open borders comes to an end in Europe

In October 1994, I moved to Europe for the first time. The following year, I witnessed the internal borders between the first six countries — Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Portugal — fall. I spent ten years living in Europe, and explored the expanding border deregulations.

In October 2024, I moved back to Europe, and now, in 2025, precisely 30 years after borders opened in Europe, the same countries have begun implementing border checks once again. Thirty years of border-free travel promised by the Schengen Zone is being erased for the same reason we always increase surveillance, travel restrictions, and document requirements: the fear of immigration and refugees. Since the ‘refugee crisis’ of September 2015, European countries have reintroduced border checks at the EU’s internal borders more than 400 times.

Germany began this normalization last year under Chancellor Friedrich Merz by extending border checks and controls with all neighboring countries through 2026. This led France to do the same with its borders. The shift towards internal border checks across European countries also threatens to undermine core EU principles, especially freedom of movement within the bloc, and could even damage the credibility of shared EU law. My heart hurts. This is a direct assault on migrant rights. It is also an assault on everyone’s rights to privacy and freedom of movement with unnecessary surveillance and restrictions. Our societies should be moving towards border abolition and passport abolition, not reintroducing border checks and controls, and requiring biometrics to cross borders.

This week, the EU will start operating and implementing its Entry-Exit System (EES) at major airports, which replaces passport stamps with biometric digital records for non-EU short-stay travellers. This indicates an acceptance of reducing overall freedom of movement and a very real challenge to the principles of the EU and the open mobility of the Schengen Zone. The EES could create instability within the EU by setting a precedent for other member states to ignore regulations, potentially leading to the entire disintegration of the Schengen Area. If you put border controls back up, you begin the first steps of destroying the overall EU project. That’s a bigger discussion; the issue for me is global border abolition. Our right to migrate, the inequality of our freedom of movement based on the passport we are born into.

We’ve seen this pendulum swing before over a century ago. As tourism across Europe increased, thanks in large part to the accessibility of train travel, France abolished passport requirements in 1861. The rest of Europe followed suit, and by 1914, passports were not required for travel. Passports were identity documents, not border access. Then, as now, passports and visa restrictions increased in response to WWI security and refugee migration. After WWI, France and Poland, in particular, lobbied at League of Nations conferences for a return to the free movement of people across Europe. But WWII quickly solidified the move to standardize a universal passport book and strengthen visa requirements. 

The second step to EES is the roll out of the ETIAS (European Travel Information and Authorization System). This electronic authorization is a new verification for travelers from visa-exempt countries like the US and UK. While both EES and ETAIS were meant to roll out in 2026, ETIAS has not yet launched. When it does, visitors will need to register online before they travel, pay a fee, and should in most cases get a response within 24 hours. Unlike a visa, the process is fully online and takes only a few minutes. I had to do the same thing for my most recent visit to the UK now that I am no longer a resident as they launched their own system called the ETA earlier this year.

The EES (Entry/Exit System) works alongside the ETIAS to track travelers’ movements in and out of the European Union. The goal is to enhance security while making it easier for authorities to monitor compliance with the 90-day stay rule.

These border policies threaten to drag Europe back to the 1980s while simultaneously leading it into a dystopian future of hyper-surveillance. Our global view should be focused on opening borders and creating passport equality. Borders are artificial constructs we created to divide and conquer, extract resources, and limit migration. These lines demarcated on maps separate families, communities, and enable systems of violence and oppression to thrive. The building of border lines, whether physical walls like in Berlin or across the US border, or via less visible forms of surveillance, is never about protection or safety. It is always control. Keeping people out, or keeping them in. But always about control freedom of movement.

I have lived outside of my birth country for 17 years now. I have traveled and worked cumulatively outside the US for another 2 years. Nineteen years of my adult life were spent outside the US. That’s almost half my life. Freedom of mobility means I have traveled and worked in 35 countries, most of those multiple times. The only time I have needed to pre-register for travel visas was Afghanistan, and Namibia. I have lived in 7. When I am asked where I am from, I don’t know how to answer. Is it: where I was born or where I was raised? Is home where I have lived the longest and feel ‘home’, or is home where I live now? None of those answers connect to the reality of having lived in seven countries, worked for a decade in another, and traveled nomadically around the world with my daughter for a year and a half when she was in the 7th grade. 

Not once have I been unable to enter a country, leave a country, or been denied a visa. Never have I had to consider an airline ticket based on layover stop restrictions due to my passport. My Afghan friends with non-EU residency can’t take flights with European layovers without applying for transit visas. It isn’t a simple process - it can take 15-45 days to get approval. Just for an airport layover, not exiting the airport, just to take a flight that stops and transfers to another flight. It costs 80€ to apply. I don’t have to do this. Nor does anyone else I know. It’s just a select few countries at the bottom of the passport hierarchy. It’s an extra burden of time, money, and surveillance. 

We all belong to this planet. For centuries, we have roamed across continents and seas. We migrate. The Global North began drawing lines on maps, in order to extract resources from continents that were not theirs. They created ‘countries’ in lands whose people didn’t need defining. They enslaved people, stole resources, invaded and stole land, and eventually decided that we would no longer be allowed the same freedom of movement that our ancestors had. Freedom of movement is a human right. Nation-states, passports, and citizenship are artificial constructs meant to divide us, separate us, and bind us to identities that may not even be linked our actual ancestry.

The EES is just one more step backwards. History repeatedly tells us that once we impose policies of border control and surveillance, we rarely remove them. Germany and France’s actions on internal border checks will ripple across the rest of the EU, threatening to reinstate passport checks at border crossings that have been open for 30 years. This isn’t progress; this is regression based upon racism and fear of refugees. The world is big enough for all of us. Europe is big enough for all of us.