Passport privilege, the fear of Third World passports, and why we have a long way to go

It was March 2024, and I was in Jaipur for a story when my father called. “She’s gone,” he said. “She died.” His voice broke. It made no sense; I’d seen Masi, my mother’s sister, a few weeks ago. She died by suicide, Dad explained, and left a note to him, my mother and my grandmother.

I watched my tears dot my olive green t-shirt and began doing the math. It would take me a day to get back home to Mumbai, another day to get my grandmother in Delhi, and another to fly to Kenya, where the funeral would take place. But first, I’d need my passport.

It was at the Irish embassy, where it could be held for up to 15 working days, waiting on a visa. I hung up with Dad and called the embassy, where an automated voice message said I needed to send an email for all visa-related queries; I wasn’t going to make her funeral. My throat closed.

In the blurry days that followed, I would put my grandmother on a plane and soothe my rage and confusion by doing more math. What if I’d kept a closer eye on visa appointment slots? What if I’d applied for the visa a day earlier? Two days earlier?

But every time I did these calculations, one variable popped up: What if I wasn’t Indian? What if, of all the places I’ve lived as a third-culture kid, I belonged to somewhere with a strong passport instead? Singapore, Canada, Australia, Portugal, the UAE, to name a few; the list is long.

According to the United Nations’ Tourism Visa Openness Report (last published in 2023), emerging economies had an openness score of 43 versus the advanced economies’ 27. In other words, many advanced economies are ‘less’ open to tourism.

The term ‘passport privilege’ describes the ease of travel available to travelers with passports that are deemed ‘strong’; the ability to travel visa-free (or get visas-on-arrival) to most of the globe. These rankings in passport strength are released annually, and according to the most prominent ranking system—the Henley Passport Index, released in October 2025—the Singaporean passport ranks the strongest globally, with access to 193 nations, visa-free.

The Indian passport, meanwhile, slipped three places from its 2024 ranking to 83rd this year, with visa-free access to just 57 countries. As a travel editor, this makes my otherwise dream job difficult, of course. More importantly, it underlines the fact that in 2025, travel is more political than ever.

In fact, passports by their very nature, were intended to be a tool to grant access to movement for some—richer, nobler, often whiter—people over others. The first modern passport regulations, which obliged travelers to carry state-issued official identity documents, were introduced in France in 1792.

“The motives for this were mainly political,” writes historian Andreas Fahrmeir in Governments and Forgers: Passports in Nineteenth-Century Europe, one of several essays in a collection edited by Jane Caplan and John Torpey titled Documenting Individual Identity (2001). “‘Identity papers and restrictions on travel were supposed to prevent the assembly of discontented persons at strategic locations and the infiltration of the country by the agents of hostile foreign governments, as well as to help suppress vagrancy, banditry, and crime.”

And with World War One, passports soon became normalized in international travel. The first modern British passport, notes writer Leo Benedictus in a 2006 Guardian article titled A Brief History of the Passport, ‘featured a personal description, including details such as ‘shape of face,’ ‘complexion’ and ‘features.’

International travel remained highly exclusive in the USA too, until recent times. “The percentage of people who carried a passport would remain in the single digits well into the 1960s,” writes travel writer Paige McClanahan in her book, The New Tourist (2024), owing to increased access to airplane travel.

But the modern passport-visa system is entirely out of hand, specifically for people from emerging economies, developing nations transitioning towards higher standards of living, such as Brazil and India. According to the United Nations’ Tourism Visa Openness Report (last published in 2023), emerging economies had an openness score of 43 versus the advanced economies’ 27.

‘Openness’ notes the report, ‘indicates to what extent a destination is facilitating tourism,’ calculated by summing the percentage of the world population exempt from obtaining a visa with the percentages of no visa weighted by 1, visa on arrival weighted by 0.7, eVisa by 0.5 and traditional visa weighted by 0. Bearing in mind that not all nationalities need a visa, a majority of advanced economies are considerably less open to tourism from certain countries. Specifically, the report goes on to note, ’traditional [paper] visas are still predominantly required by North America (84 percent) […] the subregions of Western and Northern Europe, where the necessity exceeds 70 percent.’

… this system shows no signs of changing. It works too well for the countries that label themselves the happiest, richest and most liveable.

For passports from the Global South, visa requirements span employment letters, tax returns, pay stubs, officially certified bank statements (to show you have adequate funds to travel), booked accommodations and return flights, photocopies of all previous passports, biometrics… and visa application services/embassies can sometimes hold passports for up to one month at a time, maybe more.

Often, this is followed by an in-person interview—a humiliation ritual of sorts, where you answer questions you’ve already answered in your visa application as your self-worth plummets, even as a comparatively well-traveled person. Once you’re done, it’s a question of waiting (anxiously).

And there are no guarantees; if you’re unlucky or hold a passport from an African country (the likelihood of African applicants for Schengen visas being rejected is 11 percent higher than the global average), you lose your visa application fee, and maybe the fees on your bookings too.

Not to mention, bad luck begets bad luck: You’ll have to wait to reapply. And the next time you apply for a visa, you’ll be asked whether you’ve ever had an application rejected… Shahnaz Habib, author of Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel (2024)  and winner of the 2024 New American Voices Award, describes this ‘passportism’ (a term coined by linguist and academic Srđan Mladenov Jovanović) as “the fear of Third World passports.”

The reality of ‘passportism’ is that it doesn’t even begin to acknowledge the bigger picture or the nuances of who gets to travel or how. In India, for example, the average annual income is approximately USD$7,300, according to the World Inequality Report 2026; people traveling for leisure are privileged to do so. Especially given that the exchange rate is currently 90 rupees to one US dollar, 100 rupees to a euro, and 120 to a pound sterling. For context, a round-trip economy ticket from Delhi to New York costs USD$800 (over a tenth of the average annual income).

But weak currencies don’t exist in a vacuum either; colonial occupation depleted the wealth of colonized countries. Even after independence, consider how France essentially exercises control over its former colonies in West Africa through the CFA Franc, or how the international monetary system continues to operate to serve advanced economies across the globe. And you need only to look at nations like Mexico, Peru, and India that were richer five centuries ago and compare them to the nations that colonized them (notably Spain and Britain). And when it comes to India, as historian William Dalrymple points out: “In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8 percent of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5 percent. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed.”

Complicated economics aside, ‘passportism’ strips Global South travelers of the very things their Global North counterparts romanticize. Spontaneity is impossible; escapism is limited; ‘broadening one’s horizons’ comes at an intangible cost; being a ‘traveler’ instead of a ‘tourist’ is budget-dependent. But this system shows no signs of changing. It works too well for the countries that label themselves the happiest, richest and most liveable—the same countries that drew borders around the ones they occupied and depleted.

In August 2025, I applied for a visa to Ireland for another trip. I weighed the stack of papers I sent in as part of my Irish visa application: Not including my passport, it weighed 18 ounces (511 grams). While my passport was still with the embassy processing my visa, I needed to retrieve it for a trip to Portugal I’d booked months ago. I called the embassy, got an automated message, and was forced to email a generic visa email to request return of my passport.

The retrieval took eight days. A year later, the math remained unchanged.

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