Internet cafes, travel agencies and sometimes private individuals take over appointment slots as soon as they open and resell them to visa applicants. This practice denounced in a French parliamentary report in 2021 is gaining momentum
In Algeria, it is no longer the French consulate, VFS or TLScontact, the platforms for subcontracting visa applications, that you have to contact to obtain an appointment, but cybercafés that monopolize free appointment slots on the internet and redistribute them for money.
The practice, completely illegal, is accepted by many Algerians with fatality. “I don’t have much choice. On the VFS site, it is almost impossible to find appointments,” a disarmed Lamia told Middle East Eye.
A year ago, this architect who works in the eastern suburbs of Algiers paid 5,000 dinars (35 euros) for an appointment. His father absolutely had to go to France for treatment.
“I spent whole nights on the VFS site but everything was full. An acquaintance then suggested that I go and see in cybercafés. That’s what I did, ”reports the young woman, adding that some businesses are not content to find appointments. They even offer to fill in the forms for an additional 1,000 dinars (7 euros).
On the phone, Azzedine, the manager of the cybercafé requested by Lamia, denies charging high prices. “Searching for appointments takes up a lot of my time. I even had to recruit two people to help me,” he explains.
To go faster, Youcef, a former computer science student keen on new technologies, admits that he uses software to track appointments. He pays for his services from his room, in his parents’ apartment in Algiers-Centre.
Without work and without prospects, the young Algerian is happy to have found a good vein. “Since I placed an ad on Facebook, a lot of people have been asking me,” he happily explains to MEE.
Visa fees higher than the minimum wage
These days, the requests have multiplied. “It’s because VFS has released new slots. During the summer, there were none,” notes Youcef.
In a video widely shared on Facebook recently, Moroccan comedian Amine Radi denounced, with a touch of derision, the difficulties his parents experienced when applying for visas for France.
While going himself to inquire at the French consulate in Rabat, he was approached by an individual who offered him paying appointments.
“He asked me to call his friend Hamid to find me an appointment at 5,000 dirhams! That is to say, to have an appointment with friends, you have to pay 500 euros. What is that? Explain me?”, he asked, taken aback.
Lamia, who is about to apply for a new visa for her father, knows what to expect. In addition to the price of the meeting, she will then have to pay about 5,000 dinars (33 euros) in service fees to VFS to validate her reservation.
To this will be added the costs of processing the visa by the French consulate, worth 11,000 dinars, or 80 euros.
“With all the costs and the remuneration of the cybercafé, we greatly exceed the SMIG [minimum salary fixed in Algeria at 20,000 dinars, or around 140 euros]”, ironically the architect, who for the moment gives up the idea of a trip to France with her husband and two children. “For a family, it’s downright overpriced,” she adds regretfully.
Despite their passage through Campus France (a public body that must be requested to follow higher education in France), Algerian students must also manage on their own in order to settle the visa formalities and pay the high price.
Aymen, who has just been accepted into a university in Lyon, bought an appointment for almost 50 euros, the same asking price for visa fees.
“The cybercafé where I went displays the prices on the window. He sells visa appointments for France, Spain, the United Kingdom…”, the 23-year-old management student told MEE.
Before crossing the threshold of the cybercafé, he spent a lot of time on the VFS site on the lookout for free slots.
“I have lost count of the number of times I have logged in. Sometimes I woke up at night to look for available time slots and then I went back to sleep exhausted, ”he confides, criticizing the French consulate for releasing appointments in dribs and drabs.
In a parliamentary report submitted to the French National Assembly in January 2021, M’djid El Guerrab, former deputy of the ninth constituency of French people living abroad (Maghreb-West Africa), and his colleague from the t the time, Sira Sylla, MP for Seine-Maritime, had pointed out the boom in the business of visa appointments.
“I have lost count of the number of times I have logged in. Sometimes I would wake up at night looking for available time slots and then go back to sleep exhausted”
– Aymen, Algerian student
“The difficulty linked to making appointments is accentuated by the proliferation of pharmacies which pre-empt all slots as soon as they open on the internet and “resell” them to applicants”, they had observed.
The two parliamentarians cited a previous Senate report (carried out in 2015) which deplored the very long waiting times for making appointments.
“These deadlines for making appointments are in practice imposed on service providers by consulates according to their ability to process requests within a few days. The visa processing phase at the consulate, therefore, constitutes the bottleneck of the visa application,” the senators wrote.
“A much more flexible approach”
Since autumn 2021, the complication of the procedures is also linked to the decision of the French State to reduce the number of visas for nationals of Maghreb countries (by half for Algerians and Moroccans and by a third for Tunisians).
The government had described this decision as “necessary” because the countries in question “do not agree to take back their nationals in an irregular situation”.
During his trip to Algiers at the end of August, President Emmanuel Macron recognized that the issue of visas was one of the “sensitive” and “sources of tension” subjects. But he has not given up on the idea of restricting access to French territory to Algerians.
“We would like to have a much more flexible approach to chosen immigration, that is to say the families of dual nationals, but also the artists, sportsmen, entrepreneurs and politicians who nourish the bilateral relationship,” he said. -he said, promising to improve the processing times for applications.
At European level, the management of visa policy could take a new turn by 2025. In April, the European Commission announced its intention to create a digital platform to centralize applications.
“Visa applicants will be able to apply for a visa online, including paying the visa fee, via a single European Union [EU] platform, regardless of which Schengen country they wish to visit”, reveals the draft, stating that this “initiative would effectively improve the visa application procedure, in the sense that it would lead to a reduction in costs and burden for the Member States and applicants while strengthening the security of the Schengen area”.
