This is an abridged version of a great BBC article ‘Do passports restrict economic growth?‘, also available as a podcast, with just a few notes of my own (I will write a longer post on it later) for those of my friends/readers who are short on time.
“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.” So wrote an English publisher named John Gadsby, travelling through Europe in the mid-19th Century.
For most of history, passports were neither so ubiquitous nor so routine.
The concept of passport as protection goes back to biblical times. And protection was a privilege, not a right. And neither a requirement, may I chime in
[…] the more zealously bureaucratic continental nations had realised the passport’s potential as a tool of social and economic control.
A century earlier, French citizens had to show paperwork not only to leave the country, but to travel from town to town.
‘Oppressive invention’
While wealthy countries today secure their borders to keep unskilled workers out, municipal authorities historically used them to stop skilled workers from leaving.
[…] restrictive travel documents were unpopular.
France’s Emperor Napoleon III […] described passports as “an oppressive invention“, and abolished them in 1860.
France was not alone. More and more countries either formally abandoned passport requirements or stopped enforcing them, at least in peacetime.
You could visit 1890s America without a passport, though it helped if you were white.
Some South American countries enshrined passport-free travel in their constitutions. In China and Japan, foreigners needed passports only to venture inland.
By the turn of the 20th Century, only a handful of countries still insisted on passports to enter or leave. It seemed possible they might soon disappear altogether.
Migrant crisis
What would today’s world look like if they had?
[…] with Syrian documents, [a Kurdish family] couldn’t have boarded a plane to Canada. Passports issued by Sweden or Slovakia, or Singapore or Samoa would have been fine.
Discrimination?
[…] it’s odd. Many countries ban employers from discriminating among workers based on characteristics we can’t change: whether we’re male or female, young or old, gay or straight, black or white. […] mostly, our passport depends on the identity of our parents and location of our birth. And nobody chooses those. Despite this, there’s no public clamour to judge people not by the colour of their passport but by the content of their character.
Less than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, […] Donald Trump calls for a wall along the US-Mexico border. Europe’s leaders scramble to distinguish refugees from “economic migrants”, the assumption being that someone who isn’t fleeing persecution – but merely wants a better job or life – should not be let in.
Winners and losers
[…] economic logic points: […] In theory, whenever you allow factors of production to follow demand, output rises. In practice, […] In the wealthiest countries – by one estimate – five in six of the existing population are made better off by the arrival of immigrants. So why doesn’t this translate into popular support for open borders?
Suppose a group of Mexicans arrive in America, 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.
Security concerns
Some economists calculate global economic output would double if anyone could […] work anywhere. That suggests today’s world would be much richer if passports had died out in the early 20th Century (also I should add the wealth disparity would arguably diminish). There’s one simple reason they didn’t: World War One intervened. With security concerns […] governments imposed strict new controls on movement, and they proved unwilling to relinquish those powers once peace returned.
Like John Gadsby, anyone with the right colour passport can only count their blessings.
I am not a blogger 