Europe’s new biometric Entry/Exit System was designed to make its borders more secure and efficient. Instead, travelers at major airports are encountering lengthy queues, missed connections and hours of lost time. When that time is measured across millions of passengers, the economic cost could reach tens of billions of euros a year - raising a larger question about the hidden price of bureaucracy and whether better border security really needs to come at the expense of efficiency and freedom of movement.
The Price of Waiting
How Europe's New Border Controls Now Waste Tens of Billions of Euros a Year
Europe has discovered a remarkably expensive way to stamp a passport without actually stamping it.
The European Union's new Entry/Exit System, or EES, was supposed to bring Europe's external borders into the digital age. Instead of ink stamps, most short-term visitors from outside the EU must now surrender fingerprints, facial images and passport information to a centralized biometric system.
There is a legitimate argument for knowing who enters a country and whether that person leaves. The European Commission says EES has already exposed identity fraud, identified security risks and made it easier to detect overstayers. Those are real benefits and should not simply be dismissed.
But security policy does not exist outside economics.
Every hour a visitor spends standing in a passport-control queue is an hour not spent doing business, eating in a restaurant, visiting an attraction, attending a meeting or simply enjoying the Europe he paid to visit.
And those hours are beginning to add up.
Europe's new waiting rooms
EES began operating gradually on 12 October 2025 and became fully operational throughout the Schengen area's external borders on 10 April 2026. It records passport information, facial images and fingerprints for eligible non-EU visitors, replacing the familiar passport stamp.
The official promise was greater efficiency.
The reality has often been rather different.
By this summer, waiting times at some major European airports had doubled. At Frankfurt, average passport-control waits reportedly reached two hours during July. Maximum waits at Amsterdam reached two hours as well, while Munich saw queues rise substantially. Technical problems, malfunctioning kiosks and the need for additional staff assistance have compounded the problem.
There have also been reports of passengers missing flights and, at particularly troubled airports, waiting as long as five hours.
This is not merely an inconvenience.
Time has economic value.
What is an hour of your life worth?
EUROCONTROL's own Standard Inputs for Economic Analyses recognizes precisely this principle. Its current reference material gives an all-purpose passenger value of travel time of approximately €61.60 per hour, based on transportation-economic methodology.
This does not mean that €61.60 disappears from GDP every time somebody stands in line for an hour. Value-of-time calculations measure the economic welfare cost of consuming people's time rather than a literal cash transfer.
But this is exactly why governments and transport planners use them. Time is a scarce resource.
And EES deals in enormous numbers.
By early August, the European Commission reported that more than 150 million entries and exits had already been registered since the system began operating.
Annualized, that is on the order of 180 million border movements.
Now consider some simple scenarios.
If EES adds an average of only 30 minutes to those movements, the value of the time consumed approaches €5.5 billion a year.
At one additional hour, it is approximately €11 billion.
At two hours, the value of passenger time approaches €22 billion annually.
And that calculation includes none of the secondary costs: missed connecting flights, airline rebooking, hotel accommodation, additional airport staffing, delayed ground operations, lost restaurant reservations, disrupted business meetings or tourism spending that never takes place.
Suddenly, a figure in the neighborhood of €20 billion to €25 billion no longer looks absurd.
It looks like a plausible high-cost scenario.
More than the EU bureaucracy
For perspective, the EU's entire seven-year 2021–2027 budget heading for "European public administration" totals €73.1 billion in 2018 prices, or a little over €10 billion per year under the original financial framework. It covers salaries, pensions, buildings, equipment, IT and much of the machinery required to operate the EU institutions themselves.
In other words, under a two-hour-delay scenario, the annual economic value of time consumed at Europe's borders could be roughly twice the annual cost of administering the institutions of the European Union.
There is something almost impressive about creating a queue that expensive.
An entire year's customs revenue
Consider another comparison.
EU customs authorities collected €30.7 billion in import duties in 2025. After member states retained their collection share, exactly €23 billion was transferred to the EU budget.
That puts the upper-bound economic cost of EES delays in approximately the same league as the EU's entire annual take from customs duties.
Governments understandably devote enormous effort to collecting €23 billion.
They should devote at least some attention to preventing citizens and visitors from wasting a comparable amount of economic value standing behind retractable queue barriers.
The invisible tax
The most interesting feature of a queue is that nobody sends you a bill. This makes waiting politically attractive.
If the EU imposed a €100 "biometric processing tax" on a visiting American, Canadian, Australian or British tourist, everyone would notice it.
But make the same visitor surrender two hours of his holiday instead and the cost disappears into statistical fog. That does not make the cost imaginary.
Economists routinely assign monetary values to travel time because people themselves assign value to their time every day. They pay more for direct flights. They take taxis instead of buses. Businesses pay employees to reach meetings quickly. Tourists purchase skip-the-line tickets precisely because leisure time has value.
A compulsory queue is thus a form of hidden regulatory cost.
No money necessarily changes hands. Something more irreplaceable does:
Time.
Security without proportionality is bad government
EES should not be criticized just because it uses technology. Quite the opposite. Technology ought to make borders faster.
A well-designed digital border could identify legitimate travelers before they arrive, automate routine admissions and concentrate human scrutiny on genuinely suspicious cases.
Instead, Europe has created a system in which millions of ordinary visitors are required to participate in biometric processing while airports struggle with machines, queues and repeated registrations.
The European Commission points to genuine successes. By March, it said EES had helped identify more than 600 people considered security risks, along with cases of travelers attempting to use false identities.
The question is not whether those results have value.
The question is whether processing tens or hundreds of millions of ordinary travelers in a manner capable of imposing billions of euros in time costs is the least costly way to achieve them.
That is the question governments too rarely ask.
The Liberland alternative
Liberland was founded on a different presumption: government should justify the burdens it places upon peaceful people.
Border security is a legitimate state function. But legitimate government is not measured by how many forms it creates, fingerprints it stores or hours of human life it can consume.
It is measured partly by how efficiently it performs the few functions entrusted to it.
Europe possesses some of the world's most sophisticated technology, airports and transportation infrastructure. There is no technological reason a law-abiding traveler should spend hours demonstrating to a computer that he is the same person whose biometric passport already says who he is.
The objective should be simple: identify genuine risks quickly and allow everyone else to proceed.
A border that protects a country is useful.
A border that unnecessarily wastes millions of human hours is simply another bureaucracy with a queue.
And unlike money, those hours can never be collected back.
The Formula: Calculating the EES Economic Drain
We looked at some of the numbers, using data from a range of reputable sources as baselines. Here is a summary of the findings, the formula used to calculate the damage, and a look at how it compares to the EU's bureaucracy, customs revenue, and also the costs of implementing GDPR rules.
To understand the macro impact better, we start by modeling a single mid-sized hub (Prague) and then scale it to the broader Schengen area.
Step 1: The Prague Baseline (1 Day)
Passenger Volume: Prague processes ~8,500 non-Schengen arrivals per day.
Lost "Value of Time" (VoT): Aviation economists value a passenger's time at roughly €45/hour (NOTE: the EUROCONTROL figure we cite above is higher).
Formula: 8,500 passengers × 2.5 average hours delayed × €45 = €956,250
Lost Tourism Spend: Delayed tourists miss reservations and shopping time (estimated at €30 lost per person).
Formula: 8,500 passengers × €30 = €255,000
Aviation Logistics: Airlines absorb costs for missed connections, hotel vouchers, and tarmac delays.
Estimated conservative cost: €238,750
Prague Daily Total: ~€1.45 million lost per day.
Step 2: Scaling to Europe
The top 20 major Schengen airports handle roughly 800 million passengers a year, which is about 45 times Prague's volume. This formula produces only an estimate, as passenger statistics may differ somewhat at individual airports, but the exercise is illustrative.
Formula: €1.45 million (Prague base) × 45 (volume multiplier) = €65.25 million total daily loss.
Step 3: The Annualized Cost
Formula: €65.25 million × 365 days = €23.8 Billion per year
Even accounting for slower travel seasons, the total economic loss sits firmly around the €20 billion to €25 billion mark.
Putting €23.8 Billion into Perspective
How massive is a €23.8 billion annual loss? Let's compare it to three major features of the European Union's economy and operations.
1. The Cost of EU Bureaucracy
The Cost: €11.8 Billion per year
The Comparison: Under "Heading 7" of the EU's Multi-annual Financial Framework, the EU allocates roughly €83 billion over seven years for its entire "European Public Administration". This pays the salaries and pensions for everyone in the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Court of Justice, and all associated agencies.
The Verdict: The economic drain of passengers standing in EES lines costs double what it takes to run the entire administrative machinery of the European Union.
2. EU Customs Duties Collected
The Revenue: €23 Billion transferred per year
The Comparison: Customs duties collected on physical goods imported into the EU are a major source of revenue (Traditional Own Resources). In 2025, customs authorities collected €30.7 billion, transferring exactly €23 billion directly into the main EU budget.
The Verdict: The loss incurred by EES delays effectively cancels out 100% of the customs revenue the EU collects from global trade.
3. The Burden of GDPR Compliance
The Cost: Tens of Billions Annually
The Comparison: When the EU implemented GDPR, it forced a massive restructuring of the digital economy. Studies show that 88% of global enterprises spend over $1 million annually on GDPR compliance alone, with 40% spending more than $10 million. Across the hundreds of thousands of businesses operating in the EU, GDPR compliance costs the economy tens of billions of euros each year.
The Verdict: The EES border delays inflict a macroeconomic penalty comparable to the total corporate compliance burden of the GDPR-—except instead of paying for data protection infrastructure, the economy is paying for millions of hours of wasted human capital.
References:
* European Parliament and Council of the European Union. (2017). Regulation (EU) 2017/2226 establishing an Entry/Exit System (EES). Official Journal of the European Union. Available at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32017R2226
* EUROCONTROL. (2024). Standard Inputs for Economic Analyses. Aviation Intelligence Portal. Available at: https://www.eurocontrol.int/publication/eurocontrol-standard-inputs-economic-analyses
* Airports Council International (ACI) Europe. (2026). European Airport Traffic Report. Available at: https://www.aci-europe.org/44-industry-data/40-airport-traffic.html
* Prague Airport (Letiště Praha). (2025). Annual Passenger Demographics & Operations Report. Available at: https://www.prg.aero/en/
* European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS). (2021). European public administration: Heading 7 of the 2021-2027 MFF. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2021/690547/EPRS_BRI(2021)690547_EN.pdf
* European Commission, Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union. (2026). Customs duties – a source of revenue. Available at: https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/customs/eu-customs-union-facts-and-figures/customs-duties-source-revenue_en
* Cisco. (2024). Data Privacy Benchmark Study. Available at: https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2024/m01/organizations-ban-use-of-generative-ai-over-data-privacy-security-cisco-study.html
* Ponemon Institute & Globalscape. The True Cost of Compliance with Data Protection Regulations. Available at: https://www.globalscape.com/resources/infographics/data-compliance-costs