What would we English say if we could not go from London to the Crystal Palace or from Manchester to Stockport without a passport or police officer at our heels? Depend upon it, we are not half enough grateful to God for our national privileges.”1
Those are the musings of an English publisher named John Gadsby, traveling through Europe in the mid–nineteenth century. This was before the modern passport system, wearily familiar to anyone who’s ever crossed a national border: you stand in a line; you proffer a standardized government ID in booklet form to a uniformed official, who glances at your face to check that it resembles the image of your younger, slimmer self (that haircut—what were you thinking?). Perhaps she quizzes you about your journey, while her computer checks your name against a terrorist watch list.
For most of history, passports were neither so ubiquitous nor so routinely used. They were, essentially, a threat: a letter from a powerful person requesting anyone a traveler met to let the traveler pass unmolested—or else. The concept of passport as protection goes back to biblical times.2 And protection was a privilege, not a right: English gentlemen such as Gadsby who wanted a passport before venturing across the sea to France would need to unearth some personal social link to the relevant government minister.3
As Gadsby discovered, the more zealously bureaucratic of Continental nations had realized the passport’s potential as a tool of social and economic control. Even a century earlier, the citizens of France had to show paperwork not only to leave the country, but to travel from town to town. While wealthy countries today secure their borders to keep unskilled workers out, municipal authorities in the eighteenth century had used them to stop their skilled workers from leaving.4
As the nineteenth century progressed, the railways and the steamships made travel faster and cheaper. Passports were unpopular. France’s Emperor Napoleon III shared Gadsby’s admiration for the more relaxed British approach: he described passports as “an oppressive invention . . . an embarrassment and an obstacle to the peaceable citizen.” He abolished French passports in 1860.5
France was not alone. More and more countries either formally abandoned passport requirements or stopped bothering to enforce them, at least in peacetime.6 You could visit 1890s America without a passport, though it helped if you were white.7 In some South American countries, passport-free travel was a constitutional right.8 In China and Japan, foreigners needed passports only to venture inland.9
By the turn of the twentieth century, only a handful of countries were still insisting on passports to enter or leave. It seemed possible that passports might soon disappear altogether.10
What would today’s world look like if they had?
Early one morning in September 2015, Abdullah Kurdi, his wife, and their two young sons boarded a rubber dinghy on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey.11 They hoped to make it two and a half miles across the Aegean Sea to the Greek island of Kos. But the sea became rough and the dinghy capsized. While Abdullah managed to cling to the boat, his wife and children drowned.
The body of his younger child, three-year-old Alan, washed up on a Turkish beach, where it was photographed by a journalist from a Turkish news agency. The image of Alan Kurdi became an icon of the migrant crisis that had convulsed Europe that summer.
The Kurdis hadn’t planned to stay in Greece. They hoped eventually to start a new life near Vancouver, Canada, where Abdullah’s sister Tima worked as a hairdresser. There are easier ways to travel from Turkey to Canada than starting with a dinghy to Kos, and Abdullah had the money—the 4,000 euros he paid a people-smuggler could instead have bought plane tickets for them all.12 At least it could have if he and his family hadn’t needed the right passport.
Since the Syrian government denied citizenship to ethnic Kurds, the Kurdis had no passports.13 But even with Syrian passports, they couldn’t have boarded a plane to Canada. If they’d had passports issued by Sweden or Slovakia, or Singapore or Samoa, they’d have had no problems making the journey.14
It can seem like a natural fact of life that the name of the country on our passport determines where we can travel and work—legally, at least. But it’s a relatively recent historical development and, from a certain angle, it’s odd. Your access to a passport is, broadly speaking, determined by where you were born and the identity of your parents. (Although anybody with $250,000 can buy one from St. Kitts and Nevis.15)
In most facets of life we want our governments and our societies to help overcome such accidents. Many countries take pride in banning employers from discriminating among workers on the basis of characteristics we can’t change: whether we’re male or female, young or old, gay or straight, black or white. But when it comes to your citizenship, that’s an accident of birth that we expect governments to preserve, not erase. Yet the passport is a tool designed to ensure that a certain kind of discrimination takes place: discrimination on the grounds of nationality.
There’s little public clamor to judge people not by the color of their passport but by the content of their character. Less than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, migrant controls are back in fashion. Donald Trump calls for a wall along the United States–Mexico border. Within Europe’s twenty-six-nation Schengen zone, citizens no longer need passports to cross borders, but the system is cracking under the pressure of the migrant crisis. Europe’s leaders scramble to distinguish refugees from “economic migrants,” the assumption being that someone who isn’t fleeing persecution—someone who simply wants a better job, a better life—should not be let in.16 Politically, the logic of restrictions on migration is increasingly hard to dispute.
Yet economic logic points in the opposite direction. In theory, whenever you allow factors of production to follow demand, output rises. In practice, all migration creates winners and losers, but research indicates that there are many more winners—in the wealthiest countries, by one estimate, five in six of the existing population are made better off by the arrival of immigrants.17
So why does this not translate into popular support for open borders? There are practical and cultural reasons why migration can be badly managed: if public services aren’t upgraded quickly enough to cope with new arrivals, or if belief systems between old and new residents prove hard to reconcile. Also, the losses tend to be more visible than the gains.
Suppose a group of Mexicans arrive in the United States, ready to pick fruit for lower wages than Americans are earning. The benefits—slightly cheaper fruit for everyone—are too widely spread and small to notice, while the costs—some Americans lose their jobs—produce vocal unhappiness. It should be possible to arrange taxes and public spending to compensate the losers. But it doesn’t tend to work that way.
The economic logic of migration often seems more compelling when it doesn’t involve crossing national borders. In 1980s Britain, with recession affecting some of the country’s regions more than others, Norman Tebbit, employment minister in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, notoriously implied—or was widely taken to be implying—that the jobless should “get on their bikes” to look for work.18 How much might global economic output rise if anyone could get on their bikes to work anywhere? Some economists have calculated it would double.19
That suggests our world would now be much richer if passports had died out in the early twentieth century. There’s one simple reason they didn’t: World War I intervened.
With security concerns trumping ease of travel, governments around the world imposed strict new controls on movement—and they proved unwilling to relinquish their powers once peace returned. In 1920, the newly formed League of Nations convened an international Conference on Passports, Customs Formalities and Through Tickets, and that effectively invented the passport as we know it. From 1921, the conference said, passports should be 15.5 by 10.5 centimeters (roughly 5 by 3½ inches); 32 pages; bound in cardboard; with a photo.20 The format has changed remarkably little since.
Like John Gadsby, people with the right-color passport can only count their blessings.