Abstract
This chapter analyzes decision-making on Schengen visa applications. The chapter highlights decision-making as an organizational process of categorization with shifting empirical appropriateness and examines the decision-making process and its outcomes for Belgium, France, and Italy. I show the negative categories and the features that fall in categories country-by-country. State-bound concerns and purposes underline divergences in decision-making. Notions that pre-exist the communitarized legal framework, namely the ‘risk of procedure circumventing’ and the ‘risk of circumventing the purpose of the visa,’ inform Belgian and French organizational actions. Those notions are absent in the Italian case. Although national paths of organizational action, a coinciding operational meaning of the migratory risk is emerging. That is the risk of lawful settlements and its specifications such as the risk of applying for residence permits, the risk of marriage, and the risk for the welfare state. Because the Italian organization adopts understandings and know-how that are out-of-context yet familiar to Belgium and France, the targets of negative decisions become more and more similar. Given that a same legal framework cannot explain similarities in practice, one element remains to be questioned: the process whereby such policy change from below occurs.
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- 1.
Officers define decision-making as a case-by-case process also in the analysis of French prefectures (Spire 2008).
- 2.
Aliens Office Rapports d’activités from 2008 to 2014 and Rapports Statistiques up to 2016. Available at: https://dofi.ibz.be/sites/dvzoe/FR/Pages/Publications.aspx, accessed 10 May 2018.
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Code de la Nationalité Belge (MB 12 July 1984).
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Council Directive 2003/86/EC of 22 September 2003 on the right to family reunification.
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Loi du 15 décembre 1980 sur l’accès au territoire, le séjour, l’établissement et l’éloignement des étrangers (MB 31 December 1980).
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DIRECTIVE 2004/38/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the right of citizens of the Union and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States (OJ L 158).
- 8.
As mentioned in the chapter “Policy Work in Visa Sections,” the visite retour (return check) is a paper given to the applicant who has obtained a visa that dictates to the applicant to go to the consulate and return the paper signed as a proof of return to Morocco. This paper has no legal value. It should work as a deterrent of settlement and can be used as a proof of non-return in the event of a following application.
- 9.
Circolare n°14 del 24 ottobre 2011: La Rappresentanza valuta (…) assenza di pericolo per la sicurezza e di rischi d’immigrazione illegale. La Rappresentanza é tenuta in particolare ad accertare, in base agli elementi forniti, che il richiedente non sia da considerare un elemento a rischio migratorio, indipendentemente dai controlli di sicurezza. É da considerarsi a rischio migratorio chiunque risulti ragionevolmente sospetto di voler fare ingresso nel territorio degli Stati Schengen allo scopo di commettere reati e/o permanervi esercitando attività illegali. É altresí da considerarsi a rischio migratorio chiunque non offra garanzie sufficienti di ritorno nel Paese di provenienza.
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Infantino, F. (2019). The Making of Decisions. In: Schengen Visa Implementation and Transnational Policymaking . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10647-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10647-8_7
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