passports were created by European empires to help the police unions track down dissidents and to enforce bordering.

the reason why the global south experiences passport apartheid is because slavery and colonialism never ended.

in fact, there are more enslaved people in the present than there have ever been in human history.

edit: if you wanna learn more about what everyday bordering is and how it affects you

Not a serious answer, but restricting travel anywhere is such bullshit. I can buy a house somewhere in my country and move there, pay taxes, get a job, nobody would complain. But if I move to another country and do the same, suddenly it’s a problem or something? Why? I want everyone to have freedom of travel anywhere.

It’s because the governments of the countries of visitation believe those folks are at higher risk of overstaying.

Partially based on relations between the countries and also if they think people from that country are likely to stay illegally.

If two countries are close politically, they’ll often have a visa waiver for each other, such as Canada/US. These citizens can cross into either country anytime without reason, usually for 1-6 months.

Then you’ll often see countries that are close politically but with a large wealth/standard of living disparity. A lot of times the citizens from the richer country are free to enter the poorer one with generous time limits, while the citizens from the poorer country have a lot more restrictions. Sometimes they have visa free zones near the border but would need to apply for a visa to go further or stay longer, but the visa isn’t too hard to obtain.

Then if your countries are hostile (or even neutral but with an extreme wealth/standard of living gap) then you’ll find it extremely hard to get a visa and you’ll be basically interrogated about the purpose of your visit and likely denied anyway.

tbf Pakistan is sort of an anomaly because the government’s favorite hobby is shooting themselves in the foot.

They could easily move their passport up the rank line by like 30 spaces by just having clean diplomatic relations with other countries instead of running their embassies like a waffle house that requires bribes to get your food lol.

As in if they saw someone from a “third world” country via immigration, they either get profiled more or face discrimination at border crossings due to suspicion of overstaying or violating the terms of their visa (i.e. entering under a tourist visa but finds employment), is that why it’s difficult for immigrants from those countries to travel?

Yeah you pretty much answered your own question. Many people seek employment and the pursuit of happiness abroad since the opportunities and possibilities are much higher than at home.

While there are also security reasons on limiting passport power, it is primarily based on whether or not the country is known for immigration for employment/work. They don’t want people bypassing the work visa limit on an easy tourist visa.

The opposite also holds true, 3rd world countries don’t really gain anything from limiting 1st world people from entering. Often they’ll even offer special perks because it encourages foreign business and investment.

On a related note, I find the idea of borders and limiting immigration somewhat archaic and absurd for this very reason. If you have a healthy economy, there will always be constant demand for labor and growth. There’s really no reason to limit the human resource market, especially when visas often only allow highly educated people to immigrate.

I always found MiB’s take on it rather nice. When you have aliens traveling to earth to leave in peace and just make a living, it makes the INS (precursor to ICE) and the idea of country borders seem stupid to even exist.

It’s very much a diplomacy agreement between two country, and how likely the citizen overstaying there. Malaysia, despite having the global GDP/C rank significantly lower than USA, have a passport rank of number 3 globally, with 121 countries visa-free, while USA ranked 10, with 111 countries visa-free. And Malaysia able to enter China(and North Korea before the assassination of Kim Jong Nam) visa-free, while needing to apply an ETA for UK and Australia due to the higher than average chance of people overstaying there.

On the other spectrum, Singapore, which ranked 2, have GPD/C higher than USA. It’s not about wealth it’s about not being an asshole.

Passport strength is determined by a nation’s wealth and historical relations. Previously colonizing nations generally have a good relationship with each other and are wealthier so they allow relatively free movement, for example.

Not an answer, but it was interesting to see Russians getting banned from the US, but apparantly trump didn’t wanna ban Chinese people…

Hmmm… 🤔

(This is significant to me… because as someone originally born in China, if he banned Chinese people from entering the US… that’d be very problematic for my family… since apparantly mother and older brother is about to visit China and brother is seeking to marry someone from China and bring them to the US, a ban means bro would lose prospective future spouse candidates from a nation of 1.4 Billion people lol)

The whole concept of a ‘weak’ passport and a ‘strong’ passport is baffling.

Its basically a diplomacy / wealthy check for countries.

Basically, countries make agreements between themselves that say that a person with a passport from X country does not need a visa to visit Y country. This may be part of a trade agreement, part of a treaty, part of some larger agreement (For example, EU passports are good for any EU country because they are all part of the EU, thats included as part of countries being in the EU, not as part of an individual agreement.

So a country that has really good diplomacy might get into a lot of international agreements that let their passport enter countries without a Visa, even if all they do in the treaty is be a mediator for it. Switzerland is perhaps the most famous for this. Its not uncommon for Switzerland to be the neutral location where international treaties are negotiated, and in order to facilitate that, they get their passport to be accepted basically anywhere that wants access to those talks. So if Canada wants to be allowed into the Switzerland political arena (and they do) they need to make an agreement with Switzerland to let people visit without Visas.

The other side is money. Tourists from wealthy countries tend to spend a lot of money while on vacation, and so other countries generally want to provide access for those tourists to enter the country and spend all that money. So a country that has a relatively large wealth for individual peoples will often have a strong passport. Singapore does this really well, the Singapore passport is very very strong, largely because Singaporeans tend to have a lot of money to spend.

The third side is also money, but its more on the very wealthy / business side of money. Basically, everyone wants to sell to certain countries, with America being the poster child for this. Americans are famous for buying shitty quality goods at super expensive prices, and every country wants in on that. In order to facilitate that kind of trade, you need mid level executives / logistics people / ships etc to be able to go back and forth without needing to stop for visas all the time. So countries are happy to have Americans come into the country without a Visa, because they want some of those people to be importers.

None of these are on their own ofc. Relatively wealthy countries tend to also have a lot of diplomatic contact, and that means they often include visiting without a visa, even if they are not politically neutral. Several politically neutral countries have strong visas because they are Tax havens, and the very wealthy who use those countries to not pay taxes want to be able to travel freely.

Some countries are mass exporters, and the companies they export to want to be able to travel to that country, so they push the governments to make Visa agreements so they can more easily gain access to the low cost stuff from those countries to sell.