Relaxed

@FranckDernoncourt You can simply ask what does “If you have an official travel document, a note verbale is required” mean? You could also have heeded the comments instead of digging your heels and making bad faith arguments for your initial lazy interpretation. But yes I do expect a little more from a regular poster with a history of posting bad questions so you should definitely do some research yourself and shouldn't be surprised to get criticism if you keep posting superficial questions like that.

@FranckDernoncourt They are confused about 4 or 5 things and honestly asking an open-ended question, that can be addressed in multiple ways, not disingenuously trying to argue that “official travel document” means a passport, actively focusing on the wrong thing. You should long have edited this out instead of adding a reference to Wikipedia, this would have spared you the ridicule of linking to an older revision.

@FranckDernoncourt Unfortunately that answer is not going to help them either because what they need is not a Schengen visa (which American citizens cannot get) but a French long-stay visiteurs visa. But again, my main objection is that you're focusing on the wrong part of the requirement and actively adding to the confusion by trying to argue that a passport is an official travel document just to buttress your lazy framing. That's not acceptable from an experienced user pretending to give advice to other on visa issues.

@terdon I seriously doubt anybody will ever have this particular question (as opposed to, say, "what is meant by official travel document?“. That's one of several reasons I think Franck's questions are seldom useful. My recommendation would be to delete the answer to let the question disappear. It's already massively downvoted and I voted to close it.

@terdon Personally, I don't think the asker is dumb, I think he is being disingenuous and keeps trolling us with fake questions that do not result from a genuine attempt at solving problems so I completely get where that paragraph is coming from. Dumb questions or sincerely confused people do not annoy me as much.

Incidentally, being French doesn't exactly help you here. Franck is French too and beyond his usual lack of research, he was clearly confused. But you can enter 190+ countries visa-free and neither of you has ever needed a French or Schengen visa.

@terdon The wording could be improved but the reference to the “note verbale” and the fact the sentence starts with “if” ought to quickly dispel that confusion. “Official travel document” cannot possibly mean every passport and travel document, for that's a requirement anyway (one that is reiterated by the first checkbox).

@FranckDernoncourt But you are not asking about that (which you could have and should have, even if that wouldn't be a great question), you're taking it as granted, even trying to defend that interpretation by misquoting Wikipedia after it was pointed out that your interpretation was wrong.

That's the problem with ill-conceived questions based on a complete lack of research and superficial or disingenuous reading of the source material, you end up resorting to increasingly far-fetched pretexts to pretend there really is a question here when the actual issue is elsewhere (in this case “what does official travel document mean”).

In any case, now that it was clearly explained to you that a passport is not “an official travel document”, certainly not within the meaning of the form you're asking about, why do you refuse to update the question?

@FranckDernoncourt You convinced me you are trying to help a friend several comments ago, I already told you what you can do to help them: Warn them not to trust you with this kind of questions.

@FranckDernoncourt It does not seem that you have understood my comments, though. I am not talking about any specific requirement, I am talking about giving advice at all.

@FranckDernoncourt By providing advice and thus implying you understand visa requirements instead of urging them to seek any other source of advice they can find.

@FranckDernoncourt That's true. Case in point. Still not a reason for you to be misleading them.

@FranckDernoncourt Fair enough, then suggest they do their own research, check service-public.fr, reddit or whatever. But tip (1) is still essential.

Look, if you really want to help your friend navigate visa requirements, there are two bits of advice you can give them: (1) never ever rely on you for this kind of things and (2) come here and ask their own questions if they have one.

Incidentally, that PDF is not about Schengen visas but student visas. What does this “friend” really intend to do and have you done any basic research on visa requirements?

@FranckDernoncourt Quite hard given the general nature of the questions you are asking here. If you really wanted to help a friend instead of trolling travel.SE, you could easily check on service-public.fr or any number of official sources and quickly realize they never mention a note verbale. But instead you once again chose to misquote some obscure second-hand source that you seem to be actively misinterpreting for the sake of creating a question where there is none.

@FranckDernoncourt No, you did write “passport (which is an official travel document)”, not merely as a Wikipedia quote. You only added a Wikipedia quote later on to clumsily justify what is nonetheless an absurd reading of the original requirement.

Incidentally, earlier questions suggest that you are either a French or US citizen or both, i.e. you do not actually need a Schengen visa and you are not actually facing this question. If you did, you would know your interpretation is absurd. It's not strictly forbidden to ask a genuinely complex question that you are not personally facing but this site is not designed to comment on any random bit of text you throw at us without any serious research.

If, as you wrote, you looked up a “note verbale”, you must have realized that it is not merely “overkill” but downright absurd that millions of people everywhere would get a note verbale to get a Schengen visa. It is also absurd to write “If you have an official travel document” if that phrase cover all types of travel documents. You casually claim that a passport is “an official travel document” but that's deliberately obtuse interpretation that's only motivated by the need to pretend there is something to discuss here.

I’m voting to close this question because it is not a genuine question

(+1) That's a useful way to approach the problem but it misses the most common situation: a chatbot gives you something that sorta kinda feels like a result that should be discussed in the open literature but you are unable to find the actual source because you don't know the literature and you are using AI. The whole point of the question is muddying the water on this and pretending “AI” is somehow like Wikipedia and could be treated like a source.

@Willeke That's not completely untrue but legally highly questionable. There are visas to which the applicant is entitled to unless there are specific reasons to refuse (e.g. family reunion visas in some countries). That's not necessarily the case for Schengen short-stay visas (there was a court case about that but I cannot find it) but refusals still ought to be justified and not based only on vibes.

@WeatherVane It is indeed a copy-paste of standard reasons for a refusal with a bit of elaboration on their definition. Unlike British visa officers, Schengen decision makers don't have to do more than that and typically don't. You're just left to wonder how all this applies to your particular case with zero insight into the decision making. This also means an appeal is that much more difficult.

@GregAskew Plenty of reasons on both sides of the argument for the UK, the real question is why the EU would want that and why immigration is the first thing you think about in connection with EU membership. What the EU may demand in any case is simply a regular contribution, it's hard to see the rebate and opt-outs coming back. So the UK still has basically the same problems and same conundrums as it did before, just less leverage and less goodwill from the EU.

And yes the US embassy in Austria is an obscure low-quality website when it comes to this topic. Why would you even give that any weight to that when none of the French or EU websites say anything about that? Like I said, until they do, you don't have an actual question.

What it is actually about: ETIAS (the first quote and your original question), why random websites write stuff (the second quote), what's recommended (for obvious reasons that are already explained in the first quote), or actual binding rules? You're just changing it all the time to salvage what was a fake and ill-conceived question. It's also nonsensical to imply the US embassy is “forcing” anything but the final sentence was edited so much that it became gramatically incoherent.

It's a criticism of both versions, the edit made it even more confused, what's the point of editing a question beyond recognition or analyzing obscure low-quality websites?

@FranckDernoncourt That's exactly my point… and yet you made it about ETIAS and quotes from random website, which are all a distraction.

@FranckDernoncourt I disagree but either way, that's completely unrelated to ETIAS. If you already know or suspect there is a rule like that, it's absurd to ask why it would be mentioned on etias.com or some other random website. It's obviously because the rule already exists. And if you want to ask about these rules and you are interested in the current situation (as your first comment suggests) then low-quality info about ETIAS is a distraction and you ought to ask directly about requirements to use a specific passport (but you will probably find the question is a duplicate).

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

@FranckDernoncourt It's not there and that's exactly my point: You're wondering about a non-issue. If the official site implied that using your EU passport was somehow required beyond the obvious fact that using a non-EU passport will force you to apply for an ETIAS, pay a fee, and possibly lie on the questionnaire, there could be a valid question. But the official site doesn't even state that.

@FranckDernoncourt The US embassy is just making stuff up based on US rules and practices. Why insist on finding some random way of pretending there is actually a question when you could just ignore all this and read the official site?

A small edit isn't enough to fix anything, this basically removes the whole premise of the question, you're asking us to speculate about (your misinterpretation of) some poorly written random click-baiting website. What's the point of that?

This is not an official site and the official FAQ (obviously?) deals with what you should do when ETIAS will be fully operational.

I take all of this to be completely untrue (at least to the extent that “beating it” even has any meaning) but that wasn't what I was reacting to It's the notion that offering (tiny) “incentives” is a respectful and rational way to interact that I find most shocking. This is, in itself, deeply offensive, irrespective of the question at hand and my complete disagreement with your assumptions about it.

No and the reasons you just named are reasons why LLM are completely useless, the reasons I alluded to are reasons not to use them even they did serve some purpose, which you don't seem to be interested in.

@JonathanReez Absolutely horrendous idea, even if the tech was good for something and would solve some problem, which it doesn't, there are more reasons than I can count to avoid using it.

@DJClayworth Merely for lodging an application that is ultimately deemed frivolous? Removal is precisely what an asylum application is trying to fend off and once your application is thrown out you're back to square one, at the beginning of the removal procedure. Something like a 5-year ban seems actually more likely if you are found staying illegally without having lodged an application, which is the alternative people with little perspective at securing a long-stay visa actually face.

@DJClayworth What specific negative consequences do you suppose an application could cause?

Importantly, Dublin regulations explicitly allow any state to process any application they see fit (article 17 of the Dublin III regulation). There is no obligation for either the refugee or the state where the person is seeking to have their status recognized to do anything based on the Dublin regulation. Because states try very hard to get rid of refugees, the obligation is on the responsible member state, not the state of application.

@jcaron I am not sure how much is going to change with the new AMMR but that's not at all how the Dublin system works. In fact, Dublin requests only come into play after a person has lodged an application. The system's entire point is to ask another country to take care of a refugee, precisely because people actually can apply anywhere they want.

Why do you think your husband admitted that he is responsible that your brother will go back and what would that entail? Some nordic countries try to make sponsors financially liable for claims to public support from their relatives but beyond that it's not clear how you could force someone to leave or be responsible for their actions in a modern legal system. In any case, that's not what the Schengen invitation form is about and there is no such implication in the documents shared by @Traveller

@WeatherVane Obviously not but the question doesn't imply that it is, how is that relevant to the OP's predicament?

You're the one who brought up human rights and this vision is the most antithetical to the very idea of human rights, some latent totalitarianism with a good does of nationalism thrown in. I genuinely did not understand that's what you meant by “civilzation” but this only confirms that it wasn't a very useful concept in our earlier discussion.

I don't think humanity needs an overarching goal or that any goal is good just because it is “an idea”. I certainly do not believe a species or nation-level goal should define actual existing people's “worth” or trump their rights.

I have been to East Tampa just a couple of months ago, not the poorest in the US but pretty poor, what is that supposed to convince me of?

There is nothing arbitrary in defining poverty by relative measures, that's what it is and it's a lot more important to me than some tiny sliver of humanity perpetuating itself on Mars or some other billionaire's wet dreams.

You said “no major setbacks for human rights for citizens”, we are now at no human rights for anybody, “propel[ling] humans as a species” takes precedence.