My younger self was struck by seeing tourists in movies, zipping from one country to another. I wondered: When did they find the time to apply for a visa? Do they already know how long they can stay there with a tourist visa? Are they overstaying their visa? It was only years later that I realized: with some passports, you rarely have to ask those questions.
I had similar mixed feelings during graduate school with international conferences. Despite some occasional concerns raised about the climate impacts of conferences or their exclusion of people who might find it physically hard to travel, in-person attendance of international conferences seemed to sit firmly at the center of professional academia. One core assumption undergirding the importance of international conferences is that many can travel easily—which is, of course, not surprising given the make-up of the profession in North America.
This assumption of easy travel helps conceal the extra time and money international travel involves for some of us. Regular conference travel budgets mostly include accommodation, airfare, conference fee, and food. There is usually no extra money for visa applications: Money to reach the embassy itself, money for overnight stays before morning appointments, or money for visa fees. And one more thing: You know how direct flights are usually more expensive? Depending on your passport, you might not be able to go for the cheaper layover option. That is unless you go through the trouble of obtaining a transit visa that allows you to change planes.
The ubiquitous expectation to travel we encounter in our professional and personal lives are intertwined with many different issues and systems such as self-realization, financial status, and realities of mobility: Travel is, in certain contexts, assumed to be essential and marketed as necessary for well-developed and well-rounded selves. Travel also costs money. Traveling comfortably costs more money. How much money you have, furthermore, plays a role in where embassies and border personnel place you on the ‘national security/immigration risk’ scale. Then, there is the issue of mobility in general. Who can move, from where to where, in which way? These are decisions made neither fairly nor randomly. We have been governing and regulating mobility intensely for some time (e.g., Mayblin 2018, Neumayer 2006). Global visa regimes shift based on international agreements and negotiations between countries, and each time they signal to us who has been welcomed, in which way, where, and why.
These are all important issues. Here, however, I want to just talk about a miniscule yet crucial part of this picture, something that I have been thinking about while listening to friends talking about their experiences at various embassies, watching a visa rejection happen for someone else, while I’m in the line in an embassy, or thinking through my own experiences with different embassies. What strikes me every time is that embassies manufacture uncertainty. They intentionally create epistemic uncertainty about questions that are vital for us, but the answers to which we can only guess: What is knowledge for them? What is evidence for them? What is a standard for them?
I have to admit: Here, I am particularly thinking about visiting the “Global North” from the “Global South.” This is not to say that people with passports from Global North never need visas. They do. It is also not to say that Global South passports don’t need visas among themselves. They do. However, the requirements for those visas are usually telling of how the overall travel visa regimes function (e.g., Czaika et al. 2018, Mau et al. 2015). My focus here is on “South” to “North” travel for many reasons, some of which have to do with where conferences take place, where certain professional organizations and/or universities are located, personal life, and professional structures, some of which have to do with people’s and institutions’ assumptions about which countries are desirable to live in and which are not.
Now, back to how embassies manufacture uncertainty. The common criterion used by countries/embassies when issuing non-immigrant visas is: Can the applicant demonstrate that they will definitely return to their home country or wherever they were originally residing (see for example the Immigration and Nationality Act section 214(b) for the US)? In other words, the central claim in support of which you submit documents is that “I do not intend to migrate. This is just a visit. I will leave the country I’ll be visiting and return to where I originally reside.” So, let’s ask: How do you show this intent? Or how do you convince someone that you do not intend to stay longer than you said you will? This is where the epistemic challenge begins.
Initially, the standards of eligibility seem clear enough. But they are also quite broad and problematic. For instance, you have to show some form of ties to where you live. However, not all ties are considered “legitimate.” Common options include employment, school enrollment, real-estate, other financial resources, marriage, and kids. This should give us a hint as to who gets to travel most of the time and what ways of life and forms of commitment are acknowledged and recognized by states. For instance, if your employment is not official, full-time, respectable/profitable in the global economy, what do you show as a document? Or, if your country does not recognize non-heteronormative relationships in any form, then how do you demonstrate relationship ties? Even for the cases where one can check a few of those boxes (employment, family, etc.), we do not know whether any one of them is more valued than the other or how they are overall evaluated.
Indeed, the standards of eligibility might not mean much if the officer is already convinced that you have an intention to migrate. This is usually coupled with an assumption that life in [insert “disreputable” country here] can never be as good as a life in [insert “respectable” country]. In that case, there is not enough evidence in the world to convince them otherwise. See for example the visa rejection stories of Tanzanian musicians DJ Duke and MCZO here or the experiences of Nkiacha Atemnkeng here. It is, to say the least, sad that I knew the arc of these stories before I even read them. I had already heard many similar accounts from my friends in Turkey, in India, in Nigeria, in Ghana; and there are many more of them out there. One of them is a friend from Turkey. He had a well-paying job and a good amount of money saved to travel to Australia to visit a friend. But the embassy was not convinced that he did not intend to migrate. In addition to the regular documents, they asked him to write a personal statement to convince them that he would come back to Turkey. So, when you think you understand the evidence they ask for and provide it, and yet realize that it does not mean much, how do you work around this epistemic uncertainty? What do you take as a clear indication of non-immigrant intent in a personal statement? How do you write it given that each officer might interpret the requirements quite differently and might have a different read of your non-immigrant intent? How do you decide what they need in order to know that you will definitely return?
What keeps this manufactured uncertainty in place is not only the overly broad and (if the officer is not convinced) potentially meaningless standards but also the lack of disclosure after the fact of decision. It is one thing to intentionally build vague standards into a structure to allow unaccountable decision-making. It is another to never disclose the logics—however ad hoc—behind a rejection (or acceptance for that matter). The lack of disclosure furthers and maintains the uncertainty. First, we do not know how exactly general standards are applied to applicants’ cases (whether they will be granted a visa or how long the visa will be for). Second, we will never know the specific reasoning used by decision-makers in those cases. This inaccessibility of standards and reasoning keeps people guessing what worked and what didn’t. Rejections are very vaguely explained, aka “you didn’t convince us,” “not enough documents to convince us,” “your intention to leave could not be ascertained…” This manufactures, strengthens, and sustains epistemic uncertainty, all at the same time.
And dealing with manufactured uncertainty is not easy. People try to work together to solve this puzzle. Working together is all we can do to create the resemblance of some epistemic common sense, but it is no less frustrating. There are various (online or real-life) forums out there where people share their experiences with different embassies. They talk about how different embassies approach evidence of non-immigrant intent. Does this embassy care more about the employment letter? Does it have to be from your boss or from your company? Does this one pay particular attention to where you stay? Does it matter if it is a hotel or an acquaintance or a relative? How does it matter? Would they be prioritizing a regular salary, or would they like to see a certain total sum in your bank account? In sum, people ask each other: How do I convince a visa officer?
These forums remind me of the role communities play in sense-making (e.g., Collins 2009, Dotson 2012, Fatima 2020, Grasswick 2004, Medina 2013, Pohlhaus Jr. 2012) and they definitely shine a light on the uncertainty involved. But are they helpful in resolving the uncertainty? Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are not. This is because uncertainty is built to be unresolvable. For instance, in Turkey, you hear people circulating information about different European countries and how long they are likely to issue a Schengen visa (visitor visa for the Schengen area). People might say “try this country to get into the Schengen area, they issue longer visas or they reject less.” But the problem is that no one can verify or deny these kinds of sentences beyond their one or two-time anecdotal experience. The mantra of embassies, for me, always resurfaces: “Keep guessing what we think is knowledge, what we think is evidence. Epistemic uncertainty forever!”
Every time I enter an embassy, I feel a certain kind of way. Most of the time, you have to leave your phone and all the electronics behind, move inside as only you and your documents, the sum of your bureaucratic self—your life as recorded by and for the state. Recently, I find myself thinking that what bothers me the most is the feeling of groundlessness. I have no ground unless they accept my ground. I could have the evidence, or I could not, I could speak to a standard or is there such a standard? How do I convince them that I know certain things about my life? In the absence of any ground, I’ll take my cue from the personnel and try to make sense of our conversation in the few minutes we have together. Will I know what influenced their decision? Sometimes? I guess?
Ezgi Sertler
Ezgi Sertler is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University. Her research spans feminist and social epistemologies, political philosophy, and migration studies.
