Obtaining a Schengen visa while in the US (Indiana)

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You will have to submit fingerprints, so you will have to make a personal appearance. The most convenient location for this, for you, will most likely be Chicago.

Some Schengen countries, including France, have outsourced their visa application handling to third-party service providers. For those countries, it does not matter which consular district you reside in; you can go to the nearest center.

I am not aware of any resource that lists all of the possible locations for all Schengen countries. To find out if there is a place where you could apply that is closer than Chicago, you'll have to check information for each of the Schengen countries except for these three that I've looked at already:

  • France: Washington, Boston, New York, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco

  • Germany: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Washington

  • The Netherlands: Chicago, Houston, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Washington

In addition to this, of course, you ask about "weakness" of requirements. Most requirements are nominally the same, but of course different countries, consulates, and even officers may apply them differently.

Another thing you'll want to take into account is the availability of appointments. We are frequently asked here about problems arising because the first available visa appointment for a given consulate falls after the beginning of a planned trip.

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The formal requirements are all the same. Some decisions are judgement calls by the visa officer how the guidelines should be applied in the specific case.

  • One of those decisions is if they should consider your application from the US if you're not resident there or if they should require you to apply from your country of residence. They should consider your application if the requirement to visit the Schengen area came up suddenly and if it would be an undue hardship for you to apply from your place of residence.
  • Looking for anecdotal "evidence" of weak requirements is pointless because this will change over time. Consular officers change, or they get a memo to clarify some point.

Also, you must apply at the main destination of your trip. You might try to plan your trip so there is a different main destination, but adding weeks in a country just to change the main destination sounds rather extreme.

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