Schengen with ease 'Extra-comunitarios', or citizens of non-European countries, have the 'extra' bureaucratic task of changing their status, to one that will allow them to move and work 'freely' within the European Union. The length and complexity of this process can vary depending on the type of 'extra-comunitario' in question. Almost everyone agrees that bureaucracy is the most boring thing on the world. Time spent in waiting rooms and lines is not considered as a part of living, but an interference, daily life put on hold, with the hope that, when it's all over, it will be possible to take up 'real' life again as though nothing had ever happened. It is wasted, meaningless time that has to be erased as soon as the new status is achieved - in the case that process was successful. A card with a number becomes the key to freedom and the desire for it grows stronger as the bureaucratic process, transition, irresolution, legislative limbo or whatever becomes longer and more convoluted. If it's true that we learn from life by living it, what teaches us this most boring experience? Queue better? Be more severe, obedient, or lie to the authorities better? And how did we come to this that a piece of paper can provide us freedom? "Schengen with ease" is a compilation of material from a variety of official and non-official sources, brought together to explain how daily practices are affected by the application of the EU Foreign Legislation and the Schengen Agreement in the territory of the European Union. Adopting the Assimil method (Alphonse Cherel, Paris, 1929) this book gives a systematic study of all the bureaucratic steps a "non-EU" citizen might face while trying to obtain EU status. All the required steps are taught through lessons like those found in foreign language skill books, comparing the administrative language of European immigration legislation to an unknown language that has to be mastered first in order to assimilate in to a new environment, receiving determined status. How is this legislative language written? How is it applied? And how can it be mastered? How this law really functions is that it is an exceptional law dictated by a 'economic community', that being applied from the top to the different inferior levels, national legislations, and local administrations, is creating robust bureaucratic architectures, which in practice prevent the resolution of the legal status of new arrivals, forcing them to wander around in this labyrinth without exit or to look for other solutions on another side of the law. The book also offers a comparative study of the different approaches to this legal-bureaucratic situation: While in narrative part of the lessons is exposed laic-experiential relation to the law, law as it is confronted on the part of those who have to fulfill it (that recollects some 30 personal experiences that run through the book and could be followed in independent way), grammatical part of the lessons puts together the legal-normative approximation, law as it is written (information recollected from legal sources from different EU countries and administrative levels). Finally exercise part of the lessons mix up of different bureaucratic forms, press cuttings, and parts of original documents.