Two years ago, Achour said, he applied for a visa to visit Spain and was denied. He said officials told him they were not convinced that he would return to Lebanon. The following year, he applied for a visa to Greece and was again rejected. Infuriated, he reapplied for a visa to Spain and was denied once more.
In fact, many other countries are worse off than Lebanon when it comes to visa applications.
For instance, nonimmigrant visa applications to the U.S. had a 25 percent refusal rate for Lebanese citizens in 2018, according to statistics from the U.S. State Department.
Citizens from a number of other Middle Eastern countries had higher refusal rates: 32 percent for Egyptians, 43 percent for Jordanians, 57 percent for Iraqis, 77 percent for Syrians.
In the U.K., for the fourth quarter of 2017, 13 percent of visa applications from Lebanon were refused, compared with 14 percent overall.
For Lebanese applicants, from a high of 28,983 admitted on nonimmigrant visas in 2014, the numbers dropped each year, landing at 21,911 in 2018 .
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