How Did Serbia Avoid Trump's Immigrant-Visa Ban?

The generous favors the government in Belgrade granted the Trump family as it sought to build a new Trump tower may provide a clue.

Serbia is the only non-EU member-state in the Balkans to avoid the immigrant-visa blacklist, which takes effect today. EU members are in blue. The countries in red are on the list. Image created by MapChart.

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Starting today, citizens of 75 countries around the world are banned indefinitely from applying for U.S. immigrant visas, under a new Trump administration policy. The suspension, which effectively puts on hold immigration from the affected countries, is separate from an earlier one restricting non-immigrant visas.

Along with adversaries, such as Iran, Yemen and Cuba, the new blacklist includes longtime U.S. partners in Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean — and even NATO allies.

One country, however, is conspicuously missing from the list. It’s in the Balkans, where you can find members of both the European Union and NATO. While states that belong to the EU aren’t affected by the ban, those that hold only NATO membership, such as Albania and North Macedonia, aren’t so lucky. All non-EU countries in the region, which also include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro, were blacklisted — except for Serbia.

How did the government in Belgrade pull off such a feat? Was it the result of skillful diplomacy? Or perhaps better visa statistics tracked by the State Department, such as refusal and overstay rates among Serbian citizens, compared to others in the region? Not according to department’s own figures. Last year, it denied 15.2 percent of Serbian applications for visitor visas. That rate is lower than some of the other countries’, but slightly higher than Bosnia’s 14.89 percent.

A more plausible explanation may lie in the generous favors Serbia’s government extended to the Trump family as it sought to build a Trump tower in Belgrade. The $500 million project was announced in 2024, but soon hit a major hurdle. The chosen site had protected status and was off limits by law — it once housed former strongman Slobodan Milošević’s military headquarters and was bombed by NATO during the 1999 Kosovo war.

Serbian’s current president, Aleksandar Vučić, found a way around the problem. Nine days after Trump was re-elected, his government revoked the protected status and approved the project. However, a zealous prosecutor later indicted the culture minister and other officials, after one of them admitted that the paperwork had been falsified. Following large public protests at the site, the development was abandoned last month.

Even so, Vučić made clear how far he was willing to go to accommodate Trump’s interests. “We have lost an exceptional investment,” he said after the plan was thwarted and threatened retribution. “I will personally ensure that everyone who participated in causing this damage is held accountable.”

The message is clear: foreign leaders willing to do Trump personal favors can be rewarded in return. Analyses from news organizations show that Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion. “We know this number to be an underestimate, because some of his profits remain hidden from public view,” the New York Times editorial board wrote this week. “And they continue to grow.”

At least in the Serbian case, not just Vučić, but a broader segment of his fellow citizens, may derive benefit from the blacklist exclusion.

However, there is another, less obvious consequence of Trump’s apparent return favor to Serbia that may benefit certain Russians. Although Russia is subject to the visa ban, Serbia — a staunch Russian ally — has been issuing passports to Russian citizens at a rate that has alarmed the EU. A Serbian passport grants visa-free entry to the EU, while a Russian passport doesn’t. And a Russian holding a Serbian passport can easily bypass the U.S. ban.

Consular matters, as well as consular work in the Foreign Service, are often viewed as less important than classic diplomacy, such as political and economic affairs. But cases like this one remind us that consular decisions often have serious national security implications and must be handled with care.

Here is the full list of the 75 countries on the new U.S. immigrant-visa blacklist:

Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegonia, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Congo, Cuba, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

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Nicholas Kralev is the founder and executive director of the Washington International Diplomatic Academy, and a former Financial Times and Washington Times correspondent. His books include “Diplomatic Tradecraft,” “America’s Other Army” and “Diplomats in the Trenches.”