Applying for visas at Belgium’s embassy in Dublin, some immigrants say they face mistreatment

Two weeks ago, Arpita Chakraborty hailed a cab outside Dublin City University’s (DCU) Glasnevin campus.

Chakraborty, a researcher at DCU’s School of Law and Government and a citizen of India, needed a Schengen visa.

She has been scheduled to travel to conferences in Belgium and Portugal in the coming weeks to represent the university.

Her taxi sat in traffic, she says. She was 10 minutes late for her visa appointment at the Embassy of Belgium in Ballsbridge.

“But you have a half an hour slot, right?” she said on Thursday, at a café on Dawson Street.

Still, embassy staff would just not let her in, she says. They told her she had missed the appointment.

Chakraborty asked a colleague at DCU to call the embassy and ask them to let her in – which seemed to work.

The automatic door opened, and she slipped inside and said hello to a staffer at the desk, says Chakraborty. “She looked at me, she got up and she called security.”

A security guy escorted her out. She had lost her chance.

Chakraborty felt small, she says. “It’s like they see you as inferior as a human being.”

She isn’t alone in reporting a sense of belittlement after a visa appointment at the Embassy of Belgium. Others say they have felt the same.

When that happens, there’s no straightforward route to lodge complaints.

In the past, immigrants have said that complaints to the embassies themselves don’t go anywhere much. SOLVIT, a service funded by the European Commission to hold agencies accountable for discrimination and breaches of EU law, only serves citizens of the zone.

Even as European countries rake in millions from both approved and rejected Schengen visa applications.

If visa applicants have complaints, they can post them to the Belgian embassy in Dublin, a spokesperson for Belgium’s ministry of foreign affairs said.

“Applicants are informed that if they arrive late for their appointment they will need to make a new one,” the spokesperson said

The email from the embassy asks Chakraborty to let it know if the time doesn’t suit her. But it doesn’t mention that being late means losing the slot.

The walls between us

Anish Tiwari says he has avoided the Belgian embassy in Dublin since November 2018, when, to his shock, it granted him a Schengen visa just for one week.

He had applied several times to other embassies before. He knew that Schengen visit visas aren’t supposed to be that short, he says. They can cover up to 90 days.

“I was frustrated,” said Tiwari, who is also a citizen of India, with a PhD in entrepreneurship. “They seem to have complete authority, and you can’t really hold them accountable.”

Tiwari says he understands that some people might overstay visas. But it’s wrong to punish a whole group of people for others’ missteps, he says.

Suraj Panigrahi says he was taken aback when the Belgian embassy refused to grant him a multi-entry Schengen visa – which can be used to enter the zone more than once – in 2023.

“I have a big travel history,” he said, recently. Staff came across as acting like granting him a visa at all was a big deal, he says, even though he was paying for it.

“Like they were doing me a favour,” said Panigrahi, by phone last week.

He had wanted a multi-entry visa because it’s expensive to keep applying and paying each time, he says. It used to be €80 every time, but rose to €90 just recently.

In 2023, Schengen countries earned around €130 million just from rejected visa applications, according to data compiled by the UK-based Lago Collective, which describes itself as “a community of designers, researchers and policymakers”.

Citizens of countries on the African and Asian continents shouldered the bulk of fruitless visa costs, its data suggests.

Panigrahi says that given his frequent travel and record of no overstays, he thought he would get a multi-entry visa easily.

At the embassy, staff badgered him with questions about the trip and even suggested he apply to the German embassy instead because the country had once granted him a student visa, Panigrahi says.

“I said, I’m going to Belgium, I’m going to Ghent, why should I apply from Germany?” he says.

Applicants for a Schengen visa must apply to the country of first destination or the one they will stay longest in.

Panigrahi says he was so teed off that he threw his visa application into a bin in front of staff. They didn’t seem to care, he says. “They were indifferent.”

He had taken a half-day off work to travel from Galway to Dublin for the appointment, he said.

A spokesperson for the Belgian Foreign Ministry said applicants are allowed to ask for multi-entry visas, but that doesn’t mean they’ll automatically get them. “Every application is analysed on its own merits.”

Data from the European Commission website shows that the embassies of Estonia, Hungary, Belgium and Finland in Dublin had the highest rate of refusals last year despite receiving fewer applications than some other embassies.

Estonia’s refusal rate was top. In 2023, it turned down 67 of 166 applications – a little over 40 percent.

The spokesperson for the Belgian foreign ministry said visa decisions are not made by embassy staff but by immigration officers at the Belgian Ministry of Interior.

Getting used to it

Residency permits granted by Schengen countries unlock the rest of the bloc for their holders for up to 90 days.

But Ireland is not a party to the Schengen agreement. Its non-EU residents still have to apply for visas to travel around the zone.

Chakraborty, the DCU researcher, says she had stretched her stay in Belgium upon the embassy’s request to get an appointment – as that would make Belgium the country she’d spend the most time in – since appointment slots are so hard to come by.

The embassies of Belgium and Portugal were both ignoring her requests for appointments until the embassy of Belgium finally responded.

She didn’t want to buy an appointment in the shadow market, she says.

The language used in the embassy’s correspondence, like talk of “visa shopping”, turned her off from the outset, she says.

An email says that if someone does not follow the rules about which embassy is the right one to apply for a Schengen visa, it considers that “visa shopping”.

“This is taken very seriously, and can lead to not only a refusal of your current application, but also of future Schengen visa requests in the years to come,” says an email to Chakraborty.

“I mean, visa shopping? This is the attitude they have,” said Chakraborty.

It’s ironic, she said, that one of the conferences she is trying to attend is about migration.

Chakraborty says her husband is a Spanish citizen and he filed a complaint against the Belgian embassy to SOLVIT on her behalf, to see if that works.

Partners of EU citizens can cross borders of European countries without visas only if the European citizen comes along, which isn’t always possible, said Chakraborty, who has a toddler.

On Monday, Chakraborty said that the Portuguese embassy had also said it couldn’t give her a visa in time to make the trip.

Her experience at the embassy of Belgium recalled a painful incident to her mind of queuing until the sun came up for an immigration appointment at the Burgh Quay office once, years ago, and still not making it.

She remembers asking a staffer if people who’d waited so long would be prioritised the next day, she says. “And he pushed me, he just pushed me, okay?”

He said something like, “Stand back”, Chakraborty says.

She reluctantly applied for Irish citizenship recently to shake off visa troubles for good. But India doesn’t allow dual citizenship, and she worries about the consequences of giving up her Indian passport, she says.

She points to a recent story of a British-Kashmiri academic who didn’t have an Indian passport anymore and said Indian border control sent her back to England from India, where she had travelled to attend a conference.

“So I’m very scared, if I go for Irish citizenship, what will happen?”

She has family in India and her research work in Ireland requires trips to the country, said Chakraborty.

Tiwari, the guy who was granted a week-long visa by the Belgian embassy, says he wants to hold onto his Indian passport.

Doing so, he says, means accepting discrimination and being made to feel inferior as unavoidable realities of life in the West.

“You just get used to it,” he says. “Honestly, you get discriminated so much that you get used to it.”