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Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

arunraghavan.net

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Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#121

Post by pc86 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #119
xenophonf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is there any problem in asking for a tourist visa even if your intention is attending a conference? In the U.S.A., lying on a government form is illegal, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001 . I can't imagine other countries treating that differently.

Is it necessarily lying? If you go to a conference for a hobby that's tourism, right?

Very few people speak at conferences as a hobby. Even fewer speak at conferences as hobby about things they get paid for. Even fewer would be legitimately willing to do this if it included an expensive middle-of-the-night flight, jet lag, and a Visa application process.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#122

Post by ghaff »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #117
nirbheek wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are two problems: 1. You are misrepresenting the purpose of your visit and you can get deported and/or barred from entering the country. For example, you can be stopped and asked for your passport at any time (this has happened to me multiple times, even though technically it's against Schengen rules). 2. Visiting for 2-3 days makes sense for a conference, but it makes no sense for a vacation and you will…

>Visiting for 2-3 days // Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes. Can you not go to a conference when in holiday? Isn't the difference who is paying - if you pay then it's a holiday, if work pays then it's business. Could work just give you a bonus to cover the amount at some later point? What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel f…

>What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel for tourism?

Many countries don't draw the distinction at least for people with the right passport. But to the degree there's a real rationale (beyond possibly charging more for a business visa and red tape), it's probably something along the lines of the boundaries between routine business travel in another country and working in that country are blurrier than in the case of tourism and therefore some countries think it should attract more scrutiny.

You're right that I could (and have) attended tech events on my own time and my own dime and that seems like tourism by any reasonable definition but does that fact that I didn't take vacation time and maybe submitted an expense report really fundamentally change that?

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#123

Post by jprete »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #117
nirbheek wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are two problems: 1. You are misrepresenting the purpose of your visit and you can get deported and/or barred from entering the country. For example, you can be stopped and asked for your passport at any time (this has happened to me multiple times, even though technically it's against Schengen rules). 2. Visiting for 2-3 days makes sense for a conference, but it makes no sense for a vacation and you will…

>Visiting for 2-3 days // Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes. Can you not go to a conference when in holiday? Isn't the difference who is paying - if you pay then it's a holiday, if work pays then it's business. Could work just give you a bonus to cover the amount at some later point? What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel f…

IANAL, but I think this would very much qualify as misrepresenting the purpose of the trip.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#124

Post by nirbheek »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #117
nirbheek wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are two problems: 1. You are misrepresenting the purpose of your visit and you can get deported and/or barred from entering the country. For example, you can be stopped and asked for your passport at any time (this has happened to me multiple times, even though technically it's against Schengen rules). 2. Visiting for 2-3 days makes sense for a conference, but it makes no sense for a vacation and you will…

>Visiting for 2-3 days // Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes. Can you not go to a conference when in holiday? Isn't the difference who is paying - if you pay then it's a holiday, if work pays then it's business. Could work just give you a bonus to cover the amount at some later point? What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel f…

> Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes.

Presumably to nearby countries, not via 12-15h flights with layovers, and not after an onerous visa process?

I think you underestimate how much work is needed to submit a visa application. No one in their right mind would spend several days preparing documents and traveling for a total of 30 hours for just a 3 day holiday.

> Can you not go to a conference when in holiday? Isn't the difference who is paying - if you pay then it's a holiday, if work pays then it's business

The difference is "what is the primary purpose of your visit".

There are no clear rules around this, but for Schengen countries generally you decide based on the day spent on each (because that's how you must decide which country to apply to as well, when doing a multi-country trip).

I am visiting Europe this year: attending a conference for 5 days and on holiday for two weeks. My primary purpose is tourism.

If it was 5 days of conference and 4 days of holiday, I would have to submit the application with the conference being the primary purpose, and classified as a business visitor visa.

> What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel for tourism?

No idea, you'd have to ask the consulates.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#125

Post by pc86 »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #110
i_no_can_eat wrote: post #25

There is another side to this. Whenever I have organized conferences, I end up receiving lots of requests for invitation letters, typically from researchers in India, for Visa purposes. I absolutely understand this, and I have always done my best to accommodate these requests. But this is time-consuming, and it is very annoying when those researchers (who are sometimes also scheduled to speak) never show up, and neve…

If they have paid to register for your conference, it’s your duty to write those letters. I doubt people having speaking slots at the conference will just skip out to go vacation. It’s not like they can’t vacation after the talk. More likely that they just didn’t get the visa because European visa processes, while better than US ones, are just slow.

It's not his duty to do anything, and he's explicitly saying people have accepted speaking slots then not shown up so your doubts are unfounded. Have you never attended a conference where there is a last-minute change in a speaker or talk? Theirs is not the first time I've heard of that happening, either.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#126

Post by zarzavat »

josephg wrote: post #56
niea_11 wrote: post #26

> in the US, whether you are permitted to enter and how long you may stay are determined by the person at the border I don't believe this is specific to the US. The agent at the border always has the last decision on whether you can enter the country even if you have a valid visa and travel documents.

Border guards in the US tend to be more strict than other countries though. I’ve heard plenty of stories of friends being refused entry into the US, and I don’t personally know of anyone who was rejected coming in to any other country. It’s devastating when this happens because not only are you thrown out of the country on the next flight, but once you’ve been rejected at the border once, you can never apply for a si…

The US also has some quite byzantine rules. For example, let’s imagine I fly from Europe to Canada, with a 3 hour transit in US. I stay four months in Canada because I’m a UK citizen and Canada allows me to stay up to 180 days. I return to Europe using the same route via US.

If I did that I would have overstayed in the US. Because the US only allows a stay of 90 days under the Visa Waiver program, and even though I only spent a few hours in the US, the four months in Canada counts towards the 90 day limit. The US also doesn’t have airside transit like most countries.

The correct thing to do would have been to apply for a US transit visa so that I am not entering on VWP, or to route my flight so that it doesn’t transit in US.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#127

Post by ghaff »

pc86 wrote: post #121
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it necessarily lying? If you go to a conference for a hobby that's tourism, right?

Very few people speak at conferences as a hobby. Even fewer speak at conferences as hobby about things they get paid for. Even fewer would be legitimately willing to do this if it included an expensive middle-of-the-night flight, jet lag, and a Visa application process.

I've done it. Of course, I didn't travel internationally just for the conference and I didn't need a visa, but I've attended tech conferences on my own--including speaking. Why not? And how many Europeans who attend FOSDEM or Americans who attend Flock (admittedly a lower bar than traveling internationally) are doing so on their own?

ADDED: And people with hobbies/interests like, say, medieval history absolutely will attend a conference/event as part of a vacation even if it has zero connection to a day job.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#128

Post by csomar »

Here is something conferences can do: run the conference in a visa-easy country. These usually happen to be: 1. Cheap and 2. Welcoming because they need the conference economic activity.

Of course this is unlikely to happen because the companies running these conferences are mostly based in the EU/USA/UK and would not bother with the inconvenience.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#129

Post by ryathal »

niea_11 wrote: post #26

> in the US, whether you are permitted to enter and how long you may stay are determined by the person at the border I don't believe this is specific to the US. The agent at the border always has the last decision on whether you can enter the country even if you have a valid visa and travel documents.

Something I've started mentioning, is the US immigration and customs is also pretty rude to their own citizens. Coming back to the US has been the far more stressful border crossing in my experience.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#130

Post by [deleted] »

i_no_can_eat wrote: post #25

There is another side to this. Whenever I have organized conferences, I end up receiving lots of requests for invitation letters, typically from researchers in India, for Visa purposes. I absolutely understand this, and I have always done my best to accommodate these requests. But this is time-consuming, and it is very annoying when those researchers (who are sometimes also scheduled to speak) never show up, and neve…

[deleted]
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