#Microblog Monday 314: Passport Privilege
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There have been a lot of articles recently about passport privilege, which is the power your passport holds to get you into other countries without needing to apply for a visa. The US is tied for 7th with Switzerland, the UK, Norway, and Belgium. We can get into 185 places without a prior visa, and there are 41 places where a prior visa is required.
In 2015, the US had the most powerful passport in the world, but we dropped 7 slots as relationships changed. And this ranking doesn’t include all of the borders currently closed to us due to COVID-19.
So it’s not that we can’t go to those 41 countries; it’s that we have to ask permission first. The country can choose to deny us access, just as the US does sometimes to visitors.
We talk a lot about citizenship privilege—about the ease in which a person can live because they’re residing in the country where they were born—but we don’t talk a lot about passport privilege—the ability to travel where you want to go.
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6 comments
I never realized just how privileged I was until I needed a passport to enter the U.S. (I got my first passport for that explicit reason, in 2010.) I was born in a border town (on the Canadian side), my mother was born in a small town 20 miles south, and I spent the first 50 years of my life visiting back & forth by answering a few simple questions. I don’t think I was ever even asked to show ID. When I was a kid, my parents still knew some of the crossing guards, & it was more of a social “how’s it going” chat than anything else (one official was actually a distant cousin of my mom’s). Needless to say, it’s NOT like that anymore…!
My grandfather was born on a farm (on the U.S. side) within walking distance of the border & used to tell stories about rum runners driving through their fields at night during Prohibition. He died in 1998 (not long after I lost my baby), and I was glad he wasn’t around to see the day he needed a passport to visit us in Canada. 🙁
Funny how that changed. Nope, not funny. We were finally going to give our passports a non-continental workout (it has no stamps, it only gets used to infrequently go to Canada) when all this happened, and now I wonder when we’ll be welcome. My stepfather has dual citizenship with Canada, and his Canadian passport has so much more privilege than the US one. Although he used to travel a ton for work, all over the world, and he’d prefer his Canadian passport over the US one because it garnered more respect internationally. I guess it’s new that we aren’t allowed places or need more permission to go, but not so new that we are looked at through a narrowed eye elsewhere. I can only hope that this will change for the better, say, in early 2021.
It’s so odd to me to think we aren’t welcome in other countries, but that’s a privilege in itself- so many people have to wonder about this on a regular basis, and it never really crossed my mind until we as citizens couldn’t travel any more.
There’s another element of privilege involved with the ability to travel to other countries, besides having a passport: having the financial means to do so. Airfare, hotels and meals are not cheap, and many people also don’t have the freedom to take the time off from work that would be required to travel other countries (which, due to distance and time needed to travel, can rarely be done in a weekend).
It’s sad that we’ve fallen on this list. Yet another way in which our country has lost prestige on the international front over the past few years.
Like the Canada/US arrangement in the past, in the 1970s we could go to Australia without passports and vice versa. No longer.
It is all to do with overall power – these arrangements are often part of other negotiations. It can be used for retaliation. And the US is almost always the powerful one in any relationship. So you’re never going to be in the position of smaller nations.
That said (as a smaller nation), I’ve been well aware of my privilege having a New Zealand passport. My Malaysian sisters-in-law and Thai host family and friends have always had more difficulty travelling than I did. And when I lived and worked in Southeast Asia, I would see almost every day the long queues for visas outside the US embassies. We always check whether we need visas or travel authorities when we travel. Though we are so used to NOT having to worry about that, it required a rethink when we spent three months in Italy before going on to Poland and the UK, and we had to research all the Schengen requirements for visits over 90 days.
I also agree that having a passport that makes you more welcome is useful. For example, I was able to easily travel to Israel and Jordan and Qatar and UAE in the same trip, and know I would be welcomed in each country.
I think the mobility issue around COVID is just a complicating factor, because you wouldn’t want to travel right now. Though it also explains why NZ is #1 on that index! And I remember when the EU was opening up a month or two ago and said NZ passports would be welcomed! I laughed, because we would have to take two flights, transit in airports and sit next to people from countries with rampant COVID. No thanks!
Anyway, the biggest advantage of a US passport is that you don’t have to go through US passport control as an Alien. It is such a hostile word, and a hostile process! Which is why, where possible, we travel to Europe via Asia.
Oops – sorry for the long response! I’ve had great fun going through those two sites.
I had never thought of it like this. Another reason why voting is important in the coming months.
When we lived in the Middle East, we often traveled with fellow teachers who were Canadians and who held more than one passport. We watched in fascination as we crossed borders together while they figured out which passport was most advantageous to use at each crossing. They had be be careful that they could always get back! If they got too clever, they could end up creating quite a problem for themselves.