Can a Schengen country issue a national non-Schengen visa? [closed]

Question

Do members of Schengen always issue Schengen visas, which enable the person to travel within Schengen or can a member state issue a non Schengen visa or apply limitations to a Schengen visa?

For example: in my country there is a big problem of people coming in with a short stay visa C, for example as tourists or seasonal workers, then they cross the border into another Schengen country and apply for a job there. Can some visas be limited to one country or do Schengen members always issue Schengen visas, wether they want to or not?

I know that entry into Schengen can be refused, despite a Schengen visa, for example if the visa is based on facts, which are not credible or if accommodation is missing and such.

But how does it work for travelling between Schengen countries, do the same rules apply?

For entrepreneurs working in the tourism industry it is a very confusing situation, because their guest workers get issued Schengen visas, but if the worker uses the Schengen visa to go to another country the company may get investigated for human trafficking, according to politicians I spoke to. Often buying the worker tickets back to their country of origin is not enough to deter them. But I wonder if there is any legal basis to prevent them from travelling with their Schengen visas and why this responsibility is on the hotel and not on the government which gave them a Schengen visa, they ultimately don't want them to use.

Answer 1

Without dwelling on the specifics of different types of visas and work permits, the problem is basically this:

For enterpreneurs working in the tourism industry it is a very confusing situation, because their guest workers get issued schengen visas, but if the worker uses the schengen visa to go to another country the company may get investigated for human trafficking, according to politicians I spoke to.

Another way of dealing with this would be for the law to recognize that after facilitating the entry of a foreign short-term worker, a business has limited control over the worker's subsequent actions, and therefore hold the workers themselves primarily liable. If your country's law's don't take this approach, you should talk to a local employment and/or immigration lawyer. We can't help you understand what your country's laws say on the matter because you haven't told us what country it is. I'm unaware of any EU legislation that would touch on this, but then again I wouldn't necessarily be, so it's possible that there is something. Regardless, you need to find an answer in the context of your country's national law.

can a member state issue a non schengen visa or apply limitations to a schengen visa?

Provisions exist for this sort of thing, but they're supposed to be used only in exceptional cases, mostly when a person should normally not get a visa (for example because they overstayed in one country which issued a ban) but there's a country that wants to be able to let them visit anyway. The point of this is to allow individual Schengen countries to admit the people that they want to admit.

But I wonder if there is any legal basis to prevent them from travelling with their schengen visas and why this responsibility is on the hotel and not on the government which gave them a schengen visa, they ultimately don't want them to use.

That's a question, as mentioned, for the lawyers and politicians of your country. Certainly, a hotel can't arrest people as a government can, so the possibility of forcing them to do anything is limited. Furthermore, someone with a Schengen visa is supposed to be able to visit other Schengen countries; if they work illegally there, they're violating the law of that country, not of yours, so it's unclear why your government should be involved at all, much less why they should impose any liability on the (former) employer who sponsored the initial visa.

It's possible that the politicians you spoke to were overstating the likelihood of investigation to deter you. For example, it's possible that there's a crime related to fraudulently sponsoring people for work visas and that the facts you describe don't actually constitute this crime, but that an investigator might well look into the case so as to establish that you didn't do anything fraudulent. To know for sure, you should obtain local legal advice.

Answer 2

The whole principle of the Schengen Area is that there aren't supposed to be any systematic border checks between Schengen countries (even though they are regularly re-introduced on some borders, especially recently).

So while it's actually possible to issue some types of visas with limitations on which countries it's valid for, there's no realistic way to enforce that. Unless one stumbles on a control (at the border or elsewhere), nobody will notice the restriction.

That's the reason Schengen Area countries don't like other member countries to give away visas (or residence permits, or even passports) too easily. The single travel area can only work if the rules are consistent.

Note however that getting a visa from one Schengen country, while it generally allows travel to other Schengen countries, does not allow work in other Schengen countries:

• Type C visas do not allow work without an additional work permit, which is country-specific
• Type D (national) visas allow work only in the country which issued it.

So they may go to another country and apply for jobs there, but they usually can't be hired by employers in that country without additional paperwork.

The issue is not that they travel to other countries (they are perfectly allowed to do so), it is that they do one of:

• They work illegally in another country
• They don't work but perform other illegal activities
• They overstay
• Or probably a combination.

In short: they get a way into Schengen through a "weak spot" (a country which gives visas and/or work permits more easily), and they stay and work illegally, probably in another "richer" Schengen country which would not have let them in in the first place.

Answer 3

The whole point of the system is that Schengen countries trust each other to apply the rules of the Schengen system and agreed to honor each other's visas. All short-stay visas are supposed to be Schengen visas, explicitly allowing travel between Schengen countries and exceptions (like short national visas or limited territorial validity visas) are supposed to be rare edge cases. It cannot really work any other way, the only alternative is between this and returning to national visas. This means that countries are not free to ignore or arbitrarily restrict a Schengen visa.

Another tenet of the system is that there should be no systematic checks at internal borders. That's a distinct issue but also essential to the Schengen system. Otherwise, you loose most of the practical benefits of the system (smoother travel, less enforcement costs) especially for EU citizens and residents (as they need to pay for the infrastructure and queue and stop as well). In practice, however, these rules on enforcement are increasingly being ignored by member states.

There is a long discussion in the comments about the issues you raise, what may or may not be illegal in this scenario, and whether that's actually a big problem but either way large-scale restrictions on Schengen visas' territorial validity or any attempt to enforce that systematically would effectively destroy the architecture of the Schengen system so the answer to your question is that it is generally not possible under current Schengen rules.