Moving Staying in Poland ##

In 2018, I effectively moved to Poland from Australia. But I didn’t really move to Poland, I just didn’t leave. In fact, it was just happenstance that I ended up in Poland at all; long story short, I had zero intention of being in that part of Europe at all, but one random chaotic set of actions led to meeting an American Marine in Prague, who through another random chaotic set of actions, led to him inviting me to join him on the rest of his travels. As a Marine, he had a huge binder of his exact plans, tickets, itineraries, and so on that was pre-approved by his superior in the Marines – I had a suitcase, and no plan (I did have a brief concept of a plan of travelling to Russia, all the way to Kamchatka, which has still never materialized). He didn’t intend to go to Poland either, and risked being punished for traveling to a non-pre-authorized country. In Poland, I was offered a job at a hostel, and took it – my new friend went back to where he worked, and I simply.. stayed – with my suitcase.

But foreigners can’t just stay in the Schengen region forever; they need visas (or need visa-waivers). Australians, like most of the other citizens which are beneficiary to the visa-waiver scheme, are granted a 90-day visa-free period within the Schengen region every 180-days. If you stay longer than that period, you’ll likely be fined an exorbitant amount and be banned for the Schengen region for at least 2-years (it depends on how long you’ve overstayed). There is no long-stay tourism visa for the Schengen region, and other than (especially at the time) visas for work, study, refugees, or family/marriage, getting a visa is seemingly impossible for a 20-year-old university student wanting to jump around Europe for fun.

Hacking the System for Schengen Profit ##

As those close to me know, I love operating at the edges of what’s legal – a true troll knows how to push the limits—right up to the edge of a permaban, but never over. Indeed, since flying closest to the sun and defying limits is part of my personality, so too did I find a way to stay in the Schengen region longer – by taking advantage of the system it was built upon.

The Schengen region encompasses various EU and non-EU countries in Europe, and grants people mostly-free movement between the participating countries. It was established in 1995. According to Wikipedia, Australian passport holders have enjoyed some type of Schengen visa-waiver since 1996. But what about before then? How did Australians visit those individual countries? Well of course, they had visa-waivers!

Australia previously entered into bilateral visa waiver agreements with individual European countries, allowing citizens from both Australia and their European counterpart to travel between each country for tourism purposes, with similar time-restrictions. These bilateral agreements are old. This agreement, from 1951, grants Australians 2-months visa-free in Belgium – with no provisions about prior stays; an Australian could enter Belgium, stay for 2-months minus one day, leave for a day, and come back and stay for another 2-months. A full list of these bilaterial agreements can be found here.

For Australians, most of these agreements entered into force in 1951, 1953, 1956, 1961, and 1963, and grant either 2-month or 3-month visa-free stays. The full list is quite interesting, and some unexpected countries are on the list including many countries in the Caribbean, South America, and even Mauritius. What’s more interesting is that while the vast majority of them grant the authorized length of stay without provisions of previous stays, just three countries do impose such restrictions: the Netherlands (since 1964) grants Israeli citizens 90-days-every-180-days, Belgium (since 1964) grants Israeli citizens 90-days-every-180-days and San Marino (since 1969) citizens too (this is of course a relic, since San Marino is in the Schengen region), and Latvia grants about a quarter with restrictions. Other than Italy and San Marino’s 1939 bilateral agreement, the oldest agreement is between Denmark and the USA from June 1947, and the second oldest non-USA agreement is between France and New Zealand, from December 1947.

Many of these agreements are still in-place today, and they are irrespective of the Schengen agreement, and Schengen visa-waivers. This means that Australians (and others) can stay in the Schengen region for 89-days, leave, and then re-enter into the individual country that a bilateral visa agreement is still respected. The “counter” on the Schengen visa-waiver keeps ticking during this period – if you’ve spent 89-days travelling throughout the Schengen region in the past 180-days, leave the Schengen region, and then fly into Germany and stay for 2-days, you’ve effectively overstayed your Schengen visa-waiver – 91-days in the past 180-days. But, because Germany grants Australians 90-days without a visa, if you do not leave Germany, you will not be in trouble. Your Schengen visa-waiver does not reset until you are completely out of any Schengen countries. Sound confusing? Well luckily, many of the countries have provided fact sheets describing the process.

There are provisions of course: you’re not allowed to leave the country (to other Schengen countries) of which you’ve taken advantage of the bilateral agreement – since that would then turn into a Schengen visit, not a single-country visit, and most countries require you to leave the Schengen before entering (in order to get a passport stamp as a proof-of-entry with a date). So, that’s what I did.

Since there is generally no border control when you’re inside the Schengen region, I could fly into a country with a bilaterial agreement, get my passport stamp, go to Poland, and then go back to the first country before my bilateral visa-waiver expired, leaving from the exact same airport – as if I was in the country the whole time – to the UK (not in the Schengen region) and simply repeat the same process the next day. Of course, there was a possibility the border control people could ask me for proof of my stay in the country (hotels, bills, whatever), but in each of the countries I did this in, I had friends I would visit for a few days before flying back to the UK, so I asked them to back up my story if they were contacted. This never happened, and every border control I went through knew about these bilateral agreements, and let me through to my flight without worry.

Effectively, by abusing artefacts of history, I was able to stay in Europe for an unlimited amount of time – and even in Poland specifically, despite there being no bilateral agreement between Poland and Australia.

Fun Stories and Observations ##

I had to jump between countries – travelling to Poland from each country – for around a year-and-a-half. After this point, I applied for Polish citizenship because, completely coincidently, I have Polish heritage.

During the year-and-a-half of this tiring procedure, I picked up some stories along the way.

Poland Introduced Temporary Border Controls ###

I’ve been to Kraków airport probably over 100-times now, and I know every inch of the building. So when I flew from London into Vienna to get 90-days “in Austria only” and then flew onwards to Kraków, I experienced a mini heart-attack when I was transported to the non-Schengen arrival hall with border control booths checking passports and IDs. As it turned out, in late 2018, Poland introduced temporary border controls due to an upcoming UN climate summit – apparently something which requires a high level of security at the border. I sent some quick messages at the airport to friends saying “well, I’m screwed” – if they start counting “schengen days”, they’re going to see I’ve overstayed. As I went to the booth, the officer scanned my passport (to prove its authenticity), flipped through the pages, and handed it back to me and let me through. My understanding is their role was to simply make sure you 1) haven’t been banned from entering already (or on a watchlist), and 2) have a valid travel ID. When entering, their job is not to check if you’ve overstayed – simply that you aren’t already banned. The Australian passport privilege probably helps, too.

Like any other system I try to take advantage of, understanding the system is the most important part to beating it. This was the only time that I truly had no idea what was happening.

No Passport, Border Control Checks, and Deutsche Post ###

During one of my “leave the Schengen region for a day” expeditions, I had first planned to take a bus from Poland to Graz, stay with a friend for a few days, then Graz to Cologne, flying from the airport to the UK the next day (I was utilizing the bilateral agreement between Germany and Australia). Around the same time, I needed to apply for a visa to China, which involved sending my physical passport to the Chinese embassy – which I did by first sending it to my friend in Germany, who then sent it to the embassy; the idea was that I wanted to make it seem that I was applying from within Germany (looking back, I don’t think this was actually necessary). This presented a few not-so-fun problems.

First of all, when crossing the border from Austria to Germany, the bus I was on was stopped, and a border control officer came on-board. This isn’t that rare – they do random stops of vehicles crossing the border, especially into Germany, and it normally just involves the border control officer looking at your ID, comparing it to your face, and moving on – all on the bus / through your car’s window. I prefer to fly when possible (and there are, of course, normally no border control checks at airports when you fly within the Schengen region), because these ID checks don’t happen (except for the very rare cases such as above). The problem was, I didn’t have an ID at all as it was with the post office on the way to my friend in Germany – and it was technically required to cross the border. Something like this had happened to a friend a few months earlier: they were in a bus from somewhere to Germany (legally, unlike me, who wasn’t supposed to be outside of Germany), and they had forgotten their passport; their bus got stopped at the border, everybody got asked for their ID, and my friend got pulled out of the bus at 2AM and was forced to sit at the border in a locked room until somebody (luckily) retrieved my friend’s passport and went to the airport (AKA the closest “border crossing”) to provide it to the border control people there for it to be copied/photographed/verified, at which point he was allowed across the border (after booking another bus ticket, of course). So, in this bus, I once again quickly sent some “well, I’m screwed” messages to some friends, and mentally prepared to be pulled out and get caught overstaying my Schengen visa / get caught being outside of Germany when I’m not allowed. Somehow, this time, the border control officer that came in the bus simply shined a flashlight to the back of the bus, looked at the passengers, and left – no ID check needed. Maybe there weren’t enough brown people on the bus.

Second of all, when I applied for that Chinese visa, I didn’t expect the process to take so long. In order to account for any delays, I booked flights from Germany on exactly the 90th-day that my 90-day visa-waiver was valid to. This meant two things: if I didn’t have my passport back, I would miss my flight, and if I missed my flight, I would over-stay. This ended up being extremely close: my passport arrived at my friend’s house in Germany the day before my flight – aka the same day I arrived in Germany from Austria (good thing I wasn’t caught in the bus, because my friend didn’t even have my passport!) – which was a Saturday. Another extremely lucky situation, where Deutsche Post delivers on a Saturday. If just a single thing had gone wrong; a single-day delay of my passport being returned from the Chinese embassy, my friend not answering the door to collect the mail, my flight being cancelled, or being pulled off the bus at the German-Austrian border, I would have been screwed for overstaying both my German and Schengen visa-waivers.

Illegally Entering and Escaping Exiting Poland on the Same Day ###

In late 2019, I had plans to travel to Georgia for a vacation, but the only flight available was from an airport in Poland. At this point in time, I had gotten Polish citizenship, but the only evidence of this was a “confirmation of citizenship” – I had no Polish tax number, national ID, or passport. Poland does not recognize non-Polish passports for Polish citizens – i.e. I could not show my Australian passport, say I was Polish so I didn’t need a visa, and be let to leave. It is a well-known “problem” that people who are (or are even entitled to be) citizens – even those that don’t know they are/are entitled to – will be refused exit until they get a Polish passport. Every year there are news reports in the USA about young American tourists with Polish surnames being “stuck” in Poland while they are forced to apply for a passport (for them, the solution is obviously just to go to a different Schengen country and leave, though).

My solution to this problem was not so simple: fly from Poland to Germany (where I was utilizing their visa-waiver for Australians), fly to the UK, fly to Poland, and then a few hours later at the same airport, fly to Georgia. The only problem: the airport didn’t have a transit hall; I had to enter the Schengen region through Poland (which doesn’t have a visa waiver with Australia) pretending to be a tourist, and leave again, going through passport control.

This was quite nerve-racking. Entering into Poland was fine; again, they don’t really care when you enter, just when you leave. In the case of disaster, I brought my “confirmation of Polish citizenship” with me: they could deny me exiting, but luckily they couldn’t arrest me for being an illegal immigrant anymore. For the border control officer, my passport probably made no sense at all – I was exiting/entering all of these Schengen countries without being banned for overstaying, despite no gaps between the ~2-years spent inside the Schengen region. What’s more, the most recent stamp was from today. From stories I had heard, the Polish border control was famously aggressive in trying to find illegal immigrants that had overstayed their visa, punishing overstayers with the maximum penalty possible regardless of just a few days of overstay. It took about 2-minutes, but eventually the officer just stamped my passport and let me leave. My guess is that they were so confused by the stamps, the fact I had arrived the same day, and that I had an Australian passport, that they just decided “this isn’t worth the time to investigate more, please just leave, there’s a line”.

This was the last time I left the Schengen region with my Australian passport, as after getting back from Georgia, I finally finalized my Polish documents.

Citizen Office with no Polish ###

The whole process from getting Polish citizenship to getting a Polish passport was somewhat amusing. To get citizenship, I simply paid somebody in Australia around 1,000-euros to go through public archives, take my grandparents’ documents, and fill in the right paperwork and send it to an office in Warsaw. It involved getting an “official translation” of my Australian birth certificate, which the Polish Government then certified and then produced an equivalent Polish version. The Australian Army Corps had to be contacted, for evidence of a negative – evidence (confirmation) that my grandfather did not serve in the Australian army (which would make me ineligible for citizenship by descent.)

Normally, once you receive the “confirmation of citizenship” and a Polish birth certificate, applicants have to go to their respective Polish embassy and apply for a tax number (like an American SSN), national ID, and passport. Since I was already in Poland, I simply had to go to the local city hall and do this, instead.

I imagine it’s not every day that the local Kraków city hall gets a foreigner – who (at the time) speaks no more than 100-words in Polish – applying for a tax ID number (which is normally assigned at birth) and an ID (although, I wouldn’t be surprised if people that become citizens through marriage go through a similar process). Obviously, being a complete moron, I went to the office completely unprepared, by myself, and without my phone. Of course, nobody speaks English at these offices, so attempting to go through this process was…. extremely difficult. The woman with whom I had the meeting with physically face-palmed many times, but I understood that she saw it as more funny than anything else. Nearly the end of the meeting, another issue nearly stopped the process: I hadn’t brought my Australian passport with me to the office, which was apparently needed to finish the process. I simply said I didn’t own one anymore, which wasn’t an acceptable answer. Eventually (and I assume it was just “so it would end already”), she accepted my.. Australian Victorian Learners Permit (licenses are issued by state Governments in Australia, not federal Government) – which only says I am allowed to drive in Australia as a learner, meaning with only with an accompanied people who has their full license. This is legal ID in Australia, but obviously nowhere else in the world. As I said thank you, the woman told me, “naucz się polskiego” (go and learn Polish). As I left the office, I heard somebody yelling my name from behind me; it was my boss! She happened to be there for something else, and asked me if she could finally legally hire me yet. If only she had run into me before I arrived to the office.

When I went to pick up my ID, the woman remembered me well, and I was perhaps the only person that day who had been received in that city hall by somebody with a big smile on the face of a Government worker. My Polish had only slightly improved.

Random Employment-Papers Checks ###

While working as an illegal immigrant, there were two times that a “surprise visit” happened at my work by the Government department which confirms employees have proper work contracts, insurance, etc. Luckily, both times I was not working (and legal, on-the-books employees were).

Other Stories ###

Other than myself who took advantage of these bilateral agreements, I know quite a few others that, following my education, utilized the bilateral visa-waiver agreements. I don’t have many interesting stories about those people, except for three.

• One person, from New Zealand, overstayed for about a year, but booked bus and plane tickets between Schengen countries, instead of exiting/entering the countries via a non-Schengen country. He didn’t actually get on these planes/buses, but the idea is that he would have documentation showing that he was in these places. Eventually, he stopped booking these. When he finally left, he took the documents he had and left the Schengen region from Spain; at the border, the border control officer obviously questioned him why he had overstayed, and he pulled out these (incomplete) documents, stating that he was taking advantage of the bilateral agreements in each of the countries. He was let through, and the border control officer didn’t even bother to look at the papers. From other stories that I’ve heard (but not confirmed), this is fairly common: Spain will simply wave you through, and it is/was an open secret that Spain was the best country to leave from after overstaying, due to certain culture-specific.. relaxed approach.

• One person, from Mexico (which has a bilateral agreement with Poland), would leave Poland every ~80-days, only to come back a few days later for another 80-days. After doing this three or four times, the border control officer told him “do not come back again next week or you will be denied entry” because it was obvious what he was doing (legal; but of course border control officers have the right to deny entry to anybody). I think he did come back again through Poland, and he was not denied entry.

• One person, from the USA, had overstayed his visa, and decided the safest thing to do was.. walk across the border to Ukraine. Of course, that may be the worst option you can take. He was banned from the Schengen zone for 5-years and got some type of fine.

Some other observations that I have had about how Schengen border control, border checks, and general travel within the Schengen region work, have been written on Hackernews here and here.

Thoughts on Illegal Immigration ##

Effectively, I was an illegal immigrant, working under-the-table. I’m not exactly what you think of when you think of an illegal immigrant, I reckon.

I have seen arguments (exclusively) in online discourse that suggest illegal immigrants working low-paying jobs are comparable to slavery during colonialism and especially in the USA – and those who note that poorly-paid jobs done by illegal immigrants will not be performed by others are effectively supporting slavery. I don’t know if such discourse actually takes place in real life, but I firmly believe that people who vacuum up the lowest quality of information they see/read/hear without an ounce of critical engagement do believe these things.

Notwithstanding the actual disingenuous, bad faith actors, whose arguments deliberately attempt to misrepresent (aka: lie) for one reason or another, I cannot understand how it is possible to evaluate illegal immigrants’ tough, poorly-paid jobs as slavery (in the sense of enslaved people). The obvious difference is that these immigrants have endeavoured to be in those roles, willingly, and knowingly, what it ensued. It is not a situation of them being offered or coaxed into it; they were not captured and traded as property; they were not stripped of all of their belongings; they were not mutilated and branded as cattle; and they were not born into the situation, literally not knowing of even a moment of life outside of being enslaved. In a morbid way, it is curious that the illegal immigrants that work so hard in such conditions – and struggle so much – are at the same time derided and classified as slaves by exactly those that did not have to struggle so much simply because of where they were born.

Some argue that the working conditions and poor pay effectively amounts to slavery (but not being enslaved) – but this neglects the fact that even if immigrants, who jumped through some arbitrary hoops to make themselves “legal”, performed this work, their working conditions and pay would be no different. They would no-less amount to slaves – but legal slaves™. Everybody is a slave to something; not everybody is enslaved.

Of course, some also make the argument that they fully support immigration – as long as it’s legal. But these people are (likely unwittingly) being disingenuous. If the law changed to allow anybody and everybody to enter and work in a country without limitation, they would not be OK with it – even though it’s legal. I certainly wouldn’t be OK with it, either. The earth is not a homogenous normalized space.

It’s interesting to see how nonchalantly I can describe illegal immigrants like myself (and others that I know/have known) to others in Europe. Hearing this information, I have never had the impression of ill-will or any animosity about the fact. That’s because I’m not Black, Muslim, Asian, Arab, or basically The Other. “Oh, you’re one of the good ones” – am I? Of course, I am not indifferent to the fact that I am different, but “wanting to have some fun” in Europe is not a good reason for a working visa at all (as it is a poor long-term investment for Europe)

These are just some things I think about. Looking at a photo of me at 20-years-old next to a group of others; could anybody pick me as the illegal immigrant?