My Latvian residence card is now worth more than my US passport
120 for Latvia to 87 for the USA sum of visa-free + visa on arrival countries. In basketball, this game would be called a blowout.
What distinguished this viral piece, “American Passports Are Worthless Now” (https://readmedium.com/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20678a80e) was perspective created by the lived experience of passport apartheid. Such barriers to travel were previously confined to holders of global south passports, like the writer’s Sri Lankan one. Why did the piece go viral? Because millions of Americans and other first world passport holders have now learned through travel bans, bubbles and quarantines how the other side of the passport divide has been living all along. COVID19, by removing freedom to travel, has made them aware of the privilege they’d never thought about.
It’s easy enough to realize its truth in theory. Barred from visiting my mother and brother in “the Plague States of America”, “American Passports Are Worthless Now” is now top of mind personal. I was familiar with north-south and east-west passport apartheid from playing basketball with a Lebanese here who complained about his worthless passport. From streetball games I know Indian and Sri Lankan here on student visas. My government financed Latvian language class had students from Vietnam, Syria, Israel, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, China, Kazakhstan and……one other American.
But using the term “passport apartheid” crystallized the concept, moved it from vague idea to the concrete and specific. I’d always taken my complete freedom of movement for granted and never given it a second thought. I lived for 16 years in Italy while having an apartment in NY and never applied for Italian residence. From 1993–2009 Italian immigration officials viewed my US passport as a universal skeleton key and the long lines at immigration offices in Milan were for others. This changed only when I was refused entry into the Netherlands at Schiphol in November 2011 for being in the Schengen area for more than 90 out of the previous 180 days. I had to fly back to London, go to the Latvian embassy for a temporary visa while I applied for residence through marriage to the lovely Russian-Latvian wife who, thankfully, adopted and leashed her expatriated stray dog of a husband. For four decades I’d just assumed complete freedom of movement as my birthright, with hardly a thought about the visa hoops my Kenyan, Tanzanian, Ugandan, Yemeni hotel and tour operator clients had to jump through to attend the tourism shows I met them at.
Now if I want to risk in-flight infection with a cheap flight to Bari or Crete to get a warm November tan, it’s my Latvian residence card, not my US passport that will get me there. Passport scores driven by COVID19 numbers now separate the misgoverned failed states, big or small, powerful or not, from the competently governed states. The first group tend to be geopolitical giants governed by alpha male populists. The second group of states successfully managing COVID19 tend to be geopolitical midgets, more often governed by women. If you’re from one of the first group and want the restore your passport’s value, vote to lower your country’s political testosterone level.
As Joni Mitchell sang, “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”