Apparently the EU executive is thinking of making Americans and Canadians get visas to enter European countries. The reasoning is that we and our neighbors don’t let every EU citizen in without a visa. It seems like we have problems with Croatia, Cyprus, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. (Of the European countries, those make sense to me, except for Poland. Poor Poland, they never get a break.)
While the tit for tat makes sense, wouldn’t it make sense to just stop certain states from entering without a visa? Take the five poorest per capita states in the US and require visas from them. From Wikipedia’s 2015 numbers those states would be Mississippi, West Virginia, Idaho, South Carolina and Arkansas. For Canadians, their government only requires visas from Romanians and Bulgarians, so only two of their provinces would be affected, those being Nunavut (that’s a province?) and Northwest Territories.
And while it would be difficult and odd to enforce this, the EU could do it by requesting state/province IDs from every American and Canadian, and then requiring a visa upon entry for residents of those areas.
This (tongue in cheek) policy would allow most of us to still travel, and who cares about those few people that are inconvenienced. I live in Michigan, so I’m good.