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I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens. Wow, I'm almost annoyed on the authors behalf of how much hoops there are to jump th

I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens. Wow, I'm almost annoyed on the authors behalf of how much hoops there are to jump through. >To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago. Not approximately five years, not that week—that exact day when you press "submit" on the form minus five years. Miss it by 24 hours and your application is reject after months of waiting, and you have to pay a hefty fee to re-apply. That's a hilarious requirement. I wonder how that ended up in there.

Terr_ 1y ago
Guessing it stems from "we need something dead-simple to evaluate that yields a definite yes-or-no answer, with no annoying variables." I'm trying to think of some other reason they might want a specific moment rather than "pick your own instant within this span", but I can't think of anything. Even if it was to "make sure you aren't claiming the same time on two applications to different places", the person could have simply staggered the applications.
- SecondHandTofu 1y ago
  The other reason is more mundane. There's been a lot of political incentive to reduce immigration for a long time, which means adding arbitrary friction to increase the effort of applying and decrease the number of successful applicants. Whether this is _effective_ is a different question, but certainly it's gotten a lot harder in recent decades, even pre-Brexit.
  - poncho_romero 1y ago
    That explanation doesn’t seem to jive with the fact that post-COVID the UK has accepted millions of immigrants
    - airstrike 1y ago
      it does, if the alternative would have been "more millions"
    - hrimfaxi 1y ago
      That millions were accepted says nothing about the process having changed for the worse.
  - xp84 1y ago
    lol, that’s extra funny considering that the boat people can just appear and receive not only the de facto right to remain, but get free hotel rooms for years. Meanwhile productive people with useful skills are tortured with red tape.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
Do you think applying on February 29 is allowed? Note also that this isn't a travel requirement.
jeroenhd 1y ago
It depends on where you're going and what you're doing. A lot of this faff isn't relevant if you're not applying for any visas or citizenship. Which is most people, most of the time. The obvious solution to most of these problems for most people is "don't cut it close to any of the limits". If you enjoy traveling a lot, that's definitely a problem, but most people don't cross borders often enough to run into this many corner cases. This is only a small peek into the awful bureaucracy that will hit Europe if extreme right wing parties keep gaining popularity across the EU. The extra calculations Brexit imposes, but not for every country you travel through!
- miyuru 1y ago
  > A lot of this faff isn't relevant if you're not applying for any visas or citizenship. Which is most people, most of the time. That’s true for many, but my passport isn’t very strong, so I still have to deal with a lot of paperwork for most transits.
  - rjmunro 1y ago
    If your job is travel, like you are an international truck driver or maybe aircrew, these kinds of things might affect you a lot sometimes. There's probably special rules for those people in some places, which makes the situation even more complicated.
317070 1y ago
First, the author is actually wrong. The date is not 5 years before you submit, but is 5 years before the form is received by the home office! So there are a few days of uncertainty, depending on how fast Royal Mail was with the physical documents. Additionally, I did a request for my information from the home office prior to filling in my form. After all, you have the right to request the information they have on you that will be used to verify your form. Kafka would be proud. Let me tell you, Home Office doesn't have a clue where you were 5 years ago. It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey. Plane, ferry, train, sailboat, ... it didn't matter. It seems like they have not been keeping the information very well.
- jakub_g 1y ago
  > It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey Relevant current news: Home Office denying child benefits to 1000s of people because they had incomplete data of people vacation trips, so people were thought to have emigrated and never returned [0]. Some people who never even left (due to cancelled flights, denied boardings etc.) were also affected. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/01/hmrc-likely-to-have-breached-privacy-laws-in-stopping-child-benefit-experts https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/01/hmrc-likely...
  - zarzavat 1y ago
    This is because the UK doesn't have exit checks. They rely on airlines to submit the information to them. I guess this makes sense when you consider that there's an open border with Ireland. Though you'd think that the UK and Ireland could get together to track exits...
    - jen729w 1y ago
      The UK's borders used to be hilariously lax. In 2000 I travelled a lot. To leave, as you note, you just left. To return, you'd walk past a man at Heathrow who was invariably reading the paper. He had his feet up on the desk. You were walking at a clip, passport held aloft, photo page ostensibly open towards him. That was it. Immigrated.
cm2187 1y ago
My guess is that if you need to have been there for 5y, you need to have a way to tell when that 5y starts. I presume it only matters if you apply the day after 5y. When I applied I had been in the UK for over 10y, provided 10y worth of proof of address, and the issue never came up.
Muromec 1y ago
It's not even hard really, I did it lastyear. I book a visit to the city hall, they look into the address db and see when I registered the first time. I see exactlt the same thing myself when I login into the thing. The official agrees with me on the appointment date to actually submit the application, that is after cutoff date. I put a signature on one sheet of paper, pay a thousand and go my way. The thing takes 15 min tops. But it's continental Europe, not UK
neximo64 1y ago
This is actually standard for other countries too
- atoav 1y ago
  But it is a ridculous requirement. Like having a millsecond-hand one a pendulum clock it appears to be to precise for the timeframe involved Why not just make it a before-date if you care for someone having been here for a time? So just proof that you have been here X years ago or longer. Totally sufficient and much easier to have at hand. But this is of course the point. It isn't policy where the state requires a certain thing and all people who fulfill the requirement have a shot. Instead the state makes the process of demonstrating the requirement hard on purpose as a means of reducing the people who get the benefit. And this idea isn't just unique to the described process. It is everywhere. A bit of friction in certain places is placed there on purpose and it can also be a net positive for that friction to exist. But beyond a certain level it can turn people with rights into beggars.
  - eagleal 1y ago
    Immigration laws and memos (aka office procedures) are usually opaque and ambigous by design. Be it for exploitable loopholes that benefit internal production, or whatever. Speaking of the EU, in Italy specifically for example the naturalization is really opaque and there's no clear process deadlines. While you can submit after 10 years of residence in Italy, with additional documentation from your country of origin, the process of actually getting a reply (denied or approved) may take usualy 5+ years, for some people even a decade because the people that should work on the papers forget them above a desk under a pile of dust for years. Immagine having only third-world-like country citizenship. It's a travel nightmare.
philipwhiuk 1y ago
The point is not to produce a system where a software engineer can loophole the system. The point is to try to prevent people who aren't committed to the UK apply for citizenship.
- dspillett 1y ago
  Yes, but… Convoluted rules like that smack of the ridiculous literacy tests for voting in the US during the Jim Crow era (if you don't know why the terms “grandfathering” and “grandfather clause” have fallen out of fashion in recent years, go have a poke around that bit of history which is where those terms originate). Either that or it looks like a dysfunctional overly-complicated system like the mechanisms draw by Heath Robinson, which while better still isn't good. How many good (morally) and useful (i.e. to the economy) people are being rejected because of unnecessary complications like this?
daveoc64 1y ago
>I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens. Most people can't afford to travel to the Schengen Area for more than the visa-free limit of 90 days within a 180 day period. Those that can are "digital nomads" and are almost certainly working illegally while travelling.
- bluesign 1y ago
  Illegally = like smoking weed in Amsterdam Except few countries, all EU countries tolerate this
  - lelandfe 1y ago
    Although the EES biometric system that just got added is intended to crack down on this Despite being required to, most crossings I did recently did not use it, though
    - bluesign 1y ago
      I think it is more for overstays. Years ago when I asked about my stayed days ( I was traveling a lot ) , border guard took passport and tried to count then gave up
- lmm 1y ago
  > Most people can't afford to travel to the Schengen Area for more than the visa-free limit of 90 days within a 180 day period. > Those that can are "digital nomads" and are almost certainly working illegally while travelling. WTF are you talking about? The Schengen Area is right here and you don't need a visa to work anywhere else in it. That's the whole point.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    If you don't live in the EU the rules are different. They often don't care but the rules are there. (I've been sent through the EU citizen line with my US passport which is normally fine but my coworkers on a multi year work in the EU visa have to be more careful about the right stamps - though I'm not sure exactly what this means)
pjmlp 1y ago
As someone that is about 50, we also had it this way in Europe. Newer generations don't get how lucky they are to have been born into EU, appreciate it while it lasts.
- jvdvegt 1y ago
  I'm almost 50 and from Europe, never had to think about this stuff for a second.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Well I remember the fun days of crossing borders before EU, ordering stuff from computer magazines from other countries, having to deal how to pay them across countries, and so forth. I also happened to work in Switzerland, before they made cross-region agreements with EU, and it was lot of burecratic fun, explaining the situation regarding a Portuguese, living in France and working in Switzerland.
  - baq 1y ago
    The sane side of the iron curtain. We've envied you for the longest time.
  - devjab 1y ago
    I'm mid fourties and I remember bordercrossings were annoying back in the 90ies. I'm Danish so we didn't enter Schengen until around 2000. I guess it didn't help that I was young enough that we traveled by bus. Once when we were on a school trip to Prauge we had the Slovakia borderpatrol go through our entire bus while waving machineguns around.
    - petre 1y ago
      > we had the Slovakia borderpatrol go through our entire bus while waving machineguns around Quite common in Eastern Europe before Schengen. That's why we hate border patrols, police and all sorts of uniformed men in general. They used to cut young people's blue jeans or long hair back in the '80s and bribing them was common before 2005. We also had quite a lot of policemen jokes (they were called militia men before 1990). One goes like "Why do militia men work in couples? Because one knows how to read and the other knows how to write.". I used to wish that we join Schengen so we no longer have to deal with border police any longer and they'd lose their jobs or get moved to a different border. If finally happened. Now Germany Poland, Austria and also other EU states introduce "temporary" border checks. Which they keep extending. Great.
fergie 1y ago
> I called the app Residency and you can get it here. No subscriptions, costs less than an airport martini, and you'll likely regret it less a few hours later. The article is content marketing, so I wouldn't be surprised if the pain points are being talked up somewhat (but who knows?)
- pashky 1y ago
  Anecdotal evidence: timezone-aware precision might be only necessary for those pushing it to very edge of the allowances, but travel log spreadsheet was very very real for me, and everyone else in my own immigrant bubble. I still have it somewhere. UK officials seem to operate on vibes though, not obsessive precision - I witnessed missed presence days being successfully propped up with a good sob story, but I can imagine it still being useful if you need to appeal a case where vibe turned against you. Then was a short rest between making oath and Brexit, and here we are at that shit again - spreadsheet is back, and there's a script for Schengen rolling days.
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    “Vibes” sometimes work against you. This is a great app for documenting that you met the rules if you need to. Back in 2000, entry to Canada was based on vibes. I had no idea what I was doing but looking back I don’t think they’d let someone in who forgets their DL, passport, and is on a “management consultant visa”.
poulpy123 1y ago
> I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens. I traveled before and I traveled after Schengen and the only thing that changed was not having to wait a bit at border control. What the article describe concerns a very small number of people, and exist only because of cheap air travel and internet
rkwasny 1y ago
I'll tell you a secret, UK gov has no clue where you were 5 years ago :-)
wat10000 1y ago
It’s just as difficult for EU citizens when traveling to most of the world.
aivisol 1y ago
> To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago. I am confused whats British citizenship application to do with his, or any travel at all? That's not what you do regularly, I mean most people do not apply for citizenship in other countries ever in their lives? Or am I missing something?
- pjc50 1y ago
  He needs to plan travel very carefully in order to not accidentally undermine his citizenship application.
tipst 1y ago
[dead]
Scapeghost 1y ago
Right now the biggest problem in life is the country of my passport. I have enough in savings and enough passive income to be able to live comfortably almost anywhere, but whenever I talk to travel agents, or people who can help set up companies etc in the countries I want to go to, first they're like "Sure, we can do it, when do you want it" etc and then they ask where I'm from, and when I tell them, they either stop replying or say sorry, they can't help me. sigh...Racism is a funny thing. They haven't even seen me, or seen my history of travel, or anything, they just stop cooperating when they see that one word, the name of my country. And I can't blame them either, I know many people from here go and overstay there visas and generally make problems in other countries. I just wish I could put down a deposit of a few thousand dollars as a guarantee that I'll behave and get a visa.
- captn3m0 1y ago
  Germany lets you get a Chancenkarte with a deposit of 1000EUR/month to look for a job upto a year.

Terr_ 1y ago

Guessing it stems from "we need something dead-simple to evaluate that yields a definite yes-or-no answer, with no annoying variables." I'm trying to think of some other reason they might want a specific moment rather than "pick your own instant within this span", but I can't think of anything. Even if it was to "make sure you aren't claiming the same time on two applications to different places", the person could have simply staggered the applications.

SecondHandTofu 1y ago
The other reason is more mundane. There's been a lot of political incentive to reduce immigration for a long time, which means adding arbitrary friction to increase the effort of applying and decrease the number of successful applicants. Whether this is _effective_ is a different question, but certainly it's gotten a lot harder in recent decades, even pre-Brexit.
- poncho_romero 1y ago
  That explanation doesn’t seem to jive with the fact that post-COVID the UK has accepted millions of immigrants
  - airstrike 1y ago
    it does, if the alternative would have been "more millions"
  - hrimfaxi 1y ago
    That millions were accepted says nothing about the process having changed for the worse.
- xp84 1y ago
  lol, that’s extra funny considering that the boat people can just appear and receive not only the de facto right to remain, but get free hotel rooms for years. Meanwhile productive people with useful skills are tortured with red tape.

thaumasiotes 1y ago

Do you think applying on February 29 is allowed? Note also that this isn't a travel requirement.

jeroenhd 1y ago

It depends on where you're going and what you're doing. A lot of this faff isn't relevant if you're not applying for any visas or citizenship. Which is most people, most of the time. The obvious solution to most of these problems for most people is "don't cut it close to any of the limits". If you enjoy traveling a lot, that's definitely a problem, but most people don't cross borders often enough to run into this many corner cases. This is only a small peek into the awful bureaucracy that will hit Europe if extreme right wing parties keep gaining popularity across the EU. The extra calculations Brexit imposes, but not for every country you travel through!

miyuru 1y ago
> A lot of this faff isn't relevant if you're not applying for any visas or citizenship. Which is most people, most of the time. That’s true for many, but my passport isn’t very strong, so I still have to deal with a lot of paperwork for most transits.
- rjmunro 1y ago
  If your job is travel, like you are an international truck driver or maybe aircrew, these kinds of things might affect you a lot sometimes. There's probably special rules for those people in some places, which makes the situation even more complicated.

317070 1y ago

First, the author is actually wrong. The date is not 5 years before you submit, but is 5 years before the form is received by the home office! So there are a few days of uncertainty, depending on how fast Royal Mail was with the physical documents. Additionally, I did a request for my information from the home office prior to filling in my form. After all, you have the right to request the information they have on you that will be used to verify your form. Kafka would be proud. Let me tell you, Home Office doesn't have a clue where you were 5 years ago. It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey. Plane, ferry, train, sailboat, ... it didn't matter. It seems like they have not been keeping the information very well.

jakub_g 1y ago
> It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey Relevant current news: Home Office denying child benefits to 1000s of people because they had incomplete data of people vacation trips, so people were thought to have emigrated and never returned [0]. Some people who never even left (due to cancelled flights, denied boardings etc.) were also affected. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/01/hmrc-likely-to-have-breached-privacy-laws-in-stopping-child-benefit-experts https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/01/hmrc-likely...
- zarzavat 1y ago
  This is because the UK doesn't have exit checks. They rely on airlines to submit the information to them. I guess this makes sense when you consider that there's an open border with Ireland. Though you'd think that the UK and Ireland could get together to track exits...
  - jen729w 1y ago
    The UK's borders used to be hilariously lax. In 2000 I travelled a lot. To leave, as you note, you just left. To return, you'd walk past a man at Heathrow who was invariably reading the paper. He had his feet up on the desk. You were walking at a clip, passport held aloft, photo page ostensibly open towards him. That was it. Immigrated.

cm2187 1y ago

My guess is that if you need to have been there for 5y, you need to have a way to tell when that 5y starts. I presume it only matters if you apply the day after 5y. When I applied I had been in the UK for over 10y, provided 10y worth of proof of address, and the issue never came up.

Muromec 1y ago

It's not even hard really, I did it lastyear. I book a visit to the city hall, they look into the address db and see when I registered the first time. I see exactlt the same thing myself when I login into the thing. The official agrees with me on the appointment date to actually submit the application, that is after cutoff date. I put a signature on one sheet of paper, pay a thousand and go my way. The thing takes 15 min tops. But it's continental Europe, not UK

neximo64 1y ago

This is actually standard for other countries too

atoav 1y ago
But it is a ridculous requirement. Like having a millsecond-hand one a pendulum clock it appears to be to precise for the timeframe involved Why not just make it a before-date if you care for someone having been here for a time? So just proof that you have been here X years ago or longer. Totally sufficient and much easier to have at hand. But this is of course the point. It isn't policy where the state requires a certain thing and all people who fulfill the requirement have a shot. Instead the state makes the process of demonstrating the requirement hard on purpose as a means of reducing the people who get the benefit. And this idea isn't just unique to the described process. It is everywhere. A bit of friction in certain places is placed there on purpose and it can also be a net positive for that friction to exist. But beyond a certain level it can turn people with rights into beggars.
- eagleal 1y ago
  Immigration laws and memos (aka office procedures) are usually opaque and ambigous by design. Be it for exploitable loopholes that benefit internal production, or whatever. Speaking of the EU, in Italy specifically for example the naturalization is really opaque and there's no clear process deadlines. While you can submit after 10 years of residence in Italy, with additional documentation from your country of origin, the process of actually getting a reply (denied or approved) may take usualy 5+ years, for some people even a decade because the people that should work on the papers forget them above a desk under a pile of dust for years. Immagine having only third-world-like country citizenship. It's a travel nightmare.

philipwhiuk 1y ago

The point is not to produce a system where a software engineer can loophole the system. The point is to try to prevent people who aren't committed to the UK apply for citizenship.

dspillett 1y ago
Yes, but… Convoluted rules like that smack of the ridiculous literacy tests for voting in the US during the Jim Crow era (if you don't know why the terms “grandfathering” and “grandfather clause” have fallen out of fashion in recent years, go have a poke around that bit of history which is where those terms originate). Either that or it looks like a dysfunctional overly-complicated system like the mechanisms draw by Heath Robinson, which while better still isn't good. How many good (morally) and useful (i.e. to the economy) people are being rejected because of unnecessary complications like this?

daveoc64 1y ago

>I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens. Most people can't afford to travel to the Schengen Area for more than the visa-free limit of 90 days within a 180 day period. Those that can are "digital nomads" and are almost certainly working illegally while travelling.

bluesign 1y ago
Illegally = like smoking weed in Amsterdam Except few countries, all EU countries tolerate this
- lelandfe 1y ago
  Although the EES biometric system that just got added is intended to crack down on this Despite being required to, most crossings I did recently did not use it, though
  - bluesign 1y ago
    I think it is more for overstays. Years ago when I asked about my stayed days ( I was traveling a lot ) , border guard took passport and tried to count then gave up
lmm 1y ago
> Most people can't afford to travel to the Schengen Area for more than the visa-free limit of 90 days within a 180 day period. > Those that can are "digital nomads" and are almost certainly working illegally while travelling. WTF are you talking about? The Schengen Area is right here and you don't need a visa to work anywhere else in it. That's the whole point.
- bluGill 1y ago
  If you don't live in the EU the rules are different. They often don't care but the rules are there. (I've been sent through the EU citizen line with my US passport which is normally fine but my coworkers on a multi year work in the EU visa have to be more careful about the right stamps - though I'm not sure exactly what this means)

pjmlp 1y ago

As someone that is about 50, we also had it this way in Europe. Newer generations don't get how lucky they are to have been born into EU, appreciate it while it lasts.

jvdvegt 1y ago
I'm almost 50 and from Europe, never had to think about this stuff for a second.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Well I remember the fun days of crossing borders before EU, ordering stuff from computer magazines from other countries, having to deal how to pay them across countries, and so forth. I also happened to work in Switzerland, before they made cross-region agreements with EU, and it was lot of burecratic fun, explaining the situation regarding a Portuguese, living in France and working in Switzerland.
- baq 1y ago
  The sane side of the iron curtain. We've envied you for the longest time.
- devjab 1y ago
  I'm mid fourties and I remember bordercrossings were annoying back in the 90ies. I'm Danish so we didn't enter Schengen until around 2000. I guess it didn't help that I was young enough that we traveled by bus. Once when we were on a school trip to Prauge we had the Slovakia borderpatrol go through our entire bus while waving machineguns around.
  - petre 1y ago
    > we had the Slovakia borderpatrol go through our entire bus while waving machineguns around Quite common in Eastern Europe before Schengen. That's why we hate border patrols, police and all sorts of uniformed men in general. They used to cut young people's blue jeans or long hair back in the '80s and bribing them was common before 2005. We also had quite a lot of policemen jokes (they were called militia men before 1990). One goes like "Why do militia men work in couples? Because one knows how to read and the other knows how to write.". I used to wish that we join Schengen so we no longer have to deal with border police any longer and they'd lose their jobs or get moved to a different border. If finally happened. Now Germany Poland, Austria and also other EU states introduce "temporary" border checks. Which they keep extending. Great.

fergie 1y ago

> I called the app Residency and you can get it here. No subscriptions, costs less than an airport martini, and you'll likely regret it less a few hours later. The article is content marketing, so I wouldn't be surprised if the pain points are being talked up somewhat (but who knows?)

pashky 1y ago
Anecdotal evidence: timezone-aware precision might be only necessary for those pushing it to very edge of the allowances, but travel log spreadsheet was very very real for me, and everyone else in my own immigrant bubble. I still have it somewhere. UK officials seem to operate on vibes though, not obsessive precision - I witnessed missed presence days being successfully propped up with a good sob story, but I can imagine it still being useful if you need to appeal a case where vibe turned against you. Then was a short rest between making oath and Brexit, and here we are at that shit again - spreadsheet is back, and there's a script for Schengen rolling days.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  “Vibes” sometimes work against you. This is a great app for documenting that you met the rules if you need to. Back in 2000, entry to Canada was based on vibes. I had no idea what I was doing but looking back I don’t think they’d let someone in who forgets their DL, passport, and is on a “management consultant visa”.

poulpy123 1y ago

> I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens. I traveled before and I traveled after Schengen and the only thing that changed was not having to wait a bit at border control. What the article describe concerns a very small number of people, and exist only because of cheap air travel and internet

rkwasny 1y ago

I'll tell you a secret, UK gov has no clue where you were 5 years ago :-)

wat10000 1y ago

It’s just as difficult for EU citizens when traveling to most of the world.

aivisol 1y ago

> To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago. I am confused whats British citizenship application to do with his, or any travel at all? That's not what you do regularly, I mean most people do not apply for citizenship in other countries ever in their lives? Or am I missing something?

pjc50 1y ago
He needs to plan travel very carefully in order to not accidentally undermine his citizenship application.

tipst 1y ago

[dead]

Scapeghost 1y ago

Right now the biggest problem in life is the country of my passport. I have enough in savings and enough passive income to be able to live comfortably almost anywhere, but whenever I talk to travel agents, or people who can help set up companies etc in the countries I want to go to, first they're like "Sure, we can do it, when do you want it" etc and then they ask where I'm from, and when I tell them, they either stop replying or say sorry, they can't help me. sigh...Racism is a funny thing. They haven't even seen me, or seen my history of travel, or anything, they just stop cooperating when they see that one word, the name of my country. And I can't blame them either, I know many people from here go and overstay there visas and generally make problems in other countries. I just wish I could put down a deposit of a few thousand dollars as a guarantee that I'll behave and get a visa.

captn3m0 1y ago
Germany lets you get a Chancenkarte with a deposit of 1000EUR/month to look for a job upto a year.