United States citizens traveling to Europe will soon have to pay for a visa to enter the continental bloc, thanks to an escalating “visa war,” as the Telegraph puts it, between the U.S. and the European Union.
The European Parliament, “by a show of hands, [on Wednesday] urged the Commission to adopt restrictive measures against U.S. citizens ‘within two months,'” reports Reuters.
The U.S. has long forced citizens of some E.U. countries—namely Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland, and Romania—to purchase visas in order to enter the country, denying the E.U. complete reciprocity when it comes to visa-free travel. The E.U. gave U.S. officials notice in 2014 that the country need to enact reciprocity or the visa-free travel for U.S. citizens would come to an end, but the U.S. did nothing. While E.U. officials told Reuters that talks are ongoing, under the hostile right-wing Trump administration visa reciprocity seems extremely unlikely to happen.
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