If a European under the visa waiver program has a serious criminal conviction, they cannot enter the US. Does it work the other way for the Netherlands?

Anyone?

I think I read it depends on whether they 'constitute a danger to the public'. I guess a call to the IND or Aliens Police would sort it out?

Wait a few days, I am sure you will get a response from one of the few friendly lawyers that comes on here once in a while.

According to the Schengen Borders Code, which is the law on entering the Schengen area (including the Netherlands), the condition for non-EU-citizens' entry into Schengen include:

(d) they are not persons for whom an alert has been issued in the SIS [Schengen Information System, the computer system where they keep track of who has been deported] for the purposes of refusing entry;
(e) they are not considered to be a threat to public policy, internal
security, public health or the international relations of any of the
Member States, in particular where no alert has been issued in
Member States' national data bases for the purposes of refusing
entry on the same grounds.

So it's all up to whether they consider the criminal record to constitute a threat to public policy. In EU law, 'threat to public policy' can generally only be assumed if it was something really serious: crimes against humanity, murder, rape, or hard-drug trafficking.

In practice though, will they ask at the border? No, they won't. They aren't yet having citizens of visa-free countries fill in the type of questionnaires that the US has foreigners fill in to get their visa waiver. So not telling them can't really be considered lying.

When someone applies for a long-term residence permit in the Netherlands, though, they do ask, and lying (if they find out about it) is punishable by revocation of the residence permit later on. They don't care so much about the felony/misdemeanor distinction that US criminal law makes: what they do do, if you admit to having a criminal record, is translate the specific crime into Dutch criminal law to decide how serious they think it is.

Jeremy Bierbach, LLM
www.immigrate.nl