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Why it's good to know the immigration/visa laws

1K views 9 replies 3 participants last post by  Bevdeforges 
#1 ·
Yesterday my family arrived in France after quite a travel ordeal. We have our visas and will turn them into CDS's in the next few months. Our direct flight to Paris got re-routed to Brussels due to weather. After sitting on the tarmac for over 3 hours, there was an announcement that if the weather didn't clear in half an hour, we were going to deplane and be bused to Paris.

Thanks to Bev and others on these forums, I knew that would spell big trouble for my family as we would never officially clear customs/immigration at a French border. I immediately informed the flight crew who told me they would help us make special arrangements such that our family would be allowed to wait it out in Brussels until flights became available.

And then, about 15 minutes later the pilot announced we had to hurry up and get ready to depart because there was a break in the weather. (Which I don't think there was as that was the scariest landing I think I've ever had, but that's another story....)

Moral of the story is to be informed because things don't always go as planned and you want to make sure you don't make any major mistakes when the pressure is on.
 
#2 ·
I don't think, in hindsight, it would have mattered had you entered Schengen at Brussels Airport, as you'd normally have had your passport stamped there anyway (ask for it if they don't, and keep your plane ticket/boarding pass for the Paris flight), and most visas allow you a transit through other Schengen states up to 5 days.
 
#3 ·
It kind of depends - if they deplaned solely in anticipation of a later flight, the immigration people might not have stamped their passports. It's hard to tell these days what they're going to do. (Yesterday's wind storms were pretty fierce and the airports at Paris were shut down for part of the day.)

Worst case scenario, if you were to get to France and find that no one had stamped your visa, you should go to the local gendarmerie with your boarding pass/ticket receipt and tell them what happened. They used to have the authority to stamp your passport, saying that you had just arrived "with the intent to stay for the long-term" - and even if they don't have that authority any more, they should be able to tell you where to go to get the stamp.
Cheers,
Bev
 
G
#4 ·
This is a pretty hazy area of immigration law. When my wife arrived from Bangkok in October, she arrived in Vienna with a transit flight on to Lyon. Austrian immigration stamped her passport with the Schengen states entry.

On arrival in Lyon, not an immigration officer to be seen, and in the confusion of arrival with baby and approximately twice the permitted weight of baggage (not a baht in surcharge paid!), she didn't get her passport stamped by French immigration.

I cleverly didn't notice until three months later when we were about to lodge her carte de séjour application, and for a while we were worried - would the préfecture notice this? (the CdS application required copies of Schengen visa and French entry stamp - so we included a copy of the Vienna stamp).

We needn't have worried - it wasn't even mentioned, and the CdS turned up less than two weeks later.
 
G
#9 ·
It doesn't work that way. If you live, for example, in a small Vaucluse village, there are three sets of rules that apply - European, French, and local - usually not in that order. Opting for confrontation to prove a point is not my idea of a productive move, where French bureaucracy is the problem. In many respects it remains a law unto itself. Cooperation, going with the flow, is the quickest way to achieve your ends. Taking on the system is a last resort as far as I'm concerned.
 
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