This series invites seasoned philosophers to share critical reflections on emergent and institutionalized shapes of and encounters within philosophy. The series collects experience-based explorations of philosophy’s personal, institutional, and disciplinary evolution that will also help young academics and students navigate philosophy today.
What passport do you have? If your passport is North American, South Korean, Emirati, or Western European, then you have one of the most powerful passports in the world. Because of your powerful passport, your professional life as an academic has been privileged in ways that you’re probably not even aware of.
Passport power is a rough measure of the ease with which holders of a given passport are able to travel. Powerful passports let you travel to more places visa-free. The difference between a more and a less powerful passport can be immense. To give you an idea of the difference, compare a UK passport—a passport with the third highest possible score on power—with an Indian passport, which is 64 places below. (The lowest ranked passports—Afghanistan and Syria—are at rank 94. See here.)
My UK passport lets me travel to 124 countries without a visa. For 48 more countries, I can get an e-visa or a visa upon arrival. Thanks to my UK passport, only 26 countries require a more laborious visa application process. This is almost a mirror image of my partner’s situation. Tushar is an academic philosopher with an Indian passport. He can enter only 24 countries without a visa, and is eligible for an e-visa or visa upon arrival in 47 countries. The number of countries that I can visit visa-free (124) is comparable to the number of countries that, for him, require a grueling trip to the embassy. For 127 countries, if he wants to travel there from the UK—where he lives—he needs to travel to London to submit documents and biometrics in person. You can check the rank of your own passport here.
Tushar and I are philosophers with very different lived experiences. But we both think passport privilege is a serious issue for academics from the Global South. In this piece, we discuss how a lack of passport privilege disadvantages academics from the Global South, and how institutions might help to ameliorate this disadvantage.
(Rachel) You have an Indian passport. How has that impacted your career?
(Tushar) The most obvious way is that it has severely restricted my ability to travel. In the last five years, I’ve had to turn down or repeatedly postpone many invitations to speak at conferences and colloquia.
It has also had an impact on the sorts of jobs I’ve been in a position to accept. Soon after I finished my doctorate, I was offered a fixed-term lectureship at Oxford. Because of the way that job was set up (in effect, because the pay was so low, but that’s a whole other can of worms), I could not get a work permit that would have let me stay in the country to take up that job. Luckily for me, by then we were married, and I could accept the job, but “marry a British citizen so you can take up your effectively less-than-minimum-wage job” isn’t really an option for most people (or at least it shouldn’t have to be).
But there are plenty of less obvious impacts. Take, for example, the sheer amount of time I’ve had to spend on visa applications: this year alone, I’ve easily spent the equivalent of 10 working days on visa-related administrative work—booking and traveling to visa appointments, gathering documents. Or how beholden I’ve had to be to visa appointment schedules because of how hard appointments have been to come by recently. When I flew back from a conference in the USA last November, for example, I didn’t go back home. I stayed on a friend’s sofa in London that night so I could get to the visa application center for a Schengen visa appointment the next morning because that was the only available time slot for the appointment.
Right. The sheer amount of time and mental bandwidth you have to spend on this stuff is very striking. There has been—quite rightly!—a fair amount of discussion within the profession of gendered patterns around low-prestige administrative and service work. But this is administrative labor that isn’t just low-prestige and unpaid. Performing it actually costs you substantial sums of money. And it is not just undervalued—it is by and large totally invisible to those not tasked with its performance. I, for example, was completely ignorant as to the impact of passport power before I became aware of the ways it was impacting your career. What do you wish academics with high levels of passport privilege understood about the situation of academics with low levels of passport privilege?
There are two things I wish I could get across. The first is just how demeaning, degrading, and dehumanizing the visa application process can be. At the Schengen appointment I just mentioned, I had an appointment to which I turned up 30 minutes early. When I turned up, they made me, together with all the others—including families with young children—who had turned up early, queue up outside the building in the rain. This was completely gratuitous: there was plenty of space for us to queue inside. The whole system is set up in order to produce a feeling of inferiority and to undermine one’s self-respect.
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg, though. The actual application procedure for even the shortest-term visit visa involves submitting an invasive list of documents: employment contracts, detailed bank statements, letters from employers, travel bookings, sometimes even English language tests! The last one is particularly galling for me, given that I am a native English speaker. And that’s not to mention the ordeal of the visa appointments themselves, where the default is that you’re treated like you’re requesting clemency from a capricious sixteenth-century monarch. It’s really an experience of domination. Your fate is in the hands of faceless bureaucrats who can, via those serving in-person, basically do whatever they like. For example, when applying for a UK visa a few years ago, I had to pay £700 extra for the “premium one-day service” so that I could have my passport returned in time to fly to Seattle for an important conference where I was scheduled to speak. I followed every guideline to the letter, but my application was held up because I hadn’t done an English language test. This is despite the fact that the government guidelines explicitly stated that my graduate degrees from the UK fulfilled the language requirements. I pointed this out to the bureaucrats, and they begrudgingly relented, although, rather than accept their mistake, they had the temerity to tell me that they were “making an exception” for me. But despite my having paid £700 for the one-day service, they took another eight weeks to process my visa. I had to miss the conference, and was £700 poorer. All because some bureaucrat was either incompetent or malicious.
The second is how it can turn travel into a terrifying ordeal. Here’s a recent story. After queueing up in the rain, then having my documents and finances examined with deep suspicion, I was finally granted a Schengen visa for a trip to Sweden. But it was a single-entry visa valid for precisely three days. I had no choice but to book a flight for the evening on which that visa expired. On the day, I cleared immigration in Stockholm, had my passport stamped, and was waiting at the departure gate. And then my flight was canceled.
“Don’t worry, we’ll try to book you onto a flight tonight, and if not, we’ll put you up in a hotel room,” I was told by the airline staff. But I wouldn’t be able to re-enter the country. And worse, at that point, I couldn’t even re-enter the airport terminal to catch my flight from another gate. I had to leave Sweden by midnight—no prizes for guessing how I would be treated if I overstayed my visa—but I somehow had to get to a different part of the airport, without actually traversing the intervening bit of the terminal. In the end, I suggested that they organize a bus to take me, via the tarmac, to the gate from which my replacement flight was departing. I aged pretty significantly that night.
When I tell friends and colleagues stories like this, I get the obligatory (and, for what it’s worth, genuine) performances of outrage, but then it’s all forgotten. And life just goes on. But for me, part of that life is having to live in, work in, and travel to countries that simply do not recognize people like me as fully human.
This brings out well that the problem is not just that you are forced to perform more invisible administrative labor than your more passport-privileged peers. It’s also that performing that labor is emotionally grueling. But actually, the more I think about it, the more I think that the labor paradigm is a very limited way to conceptualize your experience. It captures part of the injustice, but imperfectly. The labor you have to perform is very unlike most other kinds of academic administrative labor (if we want to count it as such), in that it cannot be neatly scheduled or compartmentalized. It bleeds into everything. I remember at one point that you needed a Schengen visa to give a talk in Germany, but appointments were so scarce that your only option was to check every night at midnight—for weeks on end!—whether any appointments had opened up. And it must be hard to bracket worries about things like flights being canceled and being left in visa limbo whilst trying to focus on preparing and delivering an academic talk.
Another important difference between visa labor and other forms of administrative labor is that whilst it can be burdensome, lots of administrative labor within academia is important and needs to be done by someone. Like housework, it has value. The problem there occurs when that necessary labor falls disproportionately on, say, women’s shoulders. Visa labor is not like that, because the fact that it falls on anyone is deeply unfair.
Do you feel that passport privilege has received less attention than other forms of disadvantage? If so, why do you think this is?
There’s no doubt that passport strength is almost invisible in the discipline as an axis of privilege. Academic philosophy, at every level, is dominated by American and European citizens. So it’s hardly surprising that considerations that are invisible to such citizens are invisible to the discipline more broadly.
And there’s a looping effect in play here, too, presumably. If a profession is dominated by those with American and European passports, to whom the professional barriers facing those with less powerful passports are invisible, those barriers will continue to exclude people with less powerful passports, and the invisibility will be maintained, and so on.
What this means is that sometimes, even when infrastructure is in place to help people with visas and immigration, that help is geared towards people with strong passports. When we were invited to Australia last year, we were told to direct our questions about the visa application process to immigration lawyers acting on behalf of the university that invited us. And they told us that we could both get e-visas. Which is just false! You could, but I could not. The charitable reading of that situation is just that they hadn’t read our emails carefully, and had assumed that I, too, had a British passport. Luckily, I had already checked well in advance what the visa requirements would be for me, so this didn’t scupper our plans. But whereas you don’t really need to know much about visas at all to successfully travel and can rely on the information you’re given, I’m forced to become a kind of autodidact expert.
The forced expertise seems to be a pattern which shows up in association with many different forms of disadvantage—it seems in some ways similar to the ways in which trans people, for example, sometimes feel obliged to become experts in gender theory just to live their lives.
Hopefully what you have said so far is enough to establish that passport privilege is an axis of advantage that we should be taking seriously. But what does taking it seriously actually look like? What measures can individuals and institutions take to ameliorate passport inequity?
We need to update our norms of academic engagement to incorporate considerations of passport inequality. As I said earlier, when I’ve told people these stories, I’ve elicited reactions that suggest that, by and large, people understand why this is such a problem. But if these discussions only happen in faculties on the few occasions when a passport-weak citizen happens to be visiting, then the drive to do something about it fades quickly after they leave. So the broadest measure that I’d like to suggest is that we systematically recognize the problems of weak passports, and make it part of the discourse.
On the topic of specific measures, I have a few suggestions. I’ll start with institutional suggestions, stressing that these really are meant to be suggestions. I want them to function as starting points for good faith discussion about how the discipline can better support its passport-disadvantaged members.
One major norm shift should be around travel expenses. It should be a standard expectation that those covering an academic’s travel expenses will cover the cost of a visa application. Applying for a visa can get very expensive very fast. First, there is the cost of the visa itself. A Schengen visa, for example, costs £73. But that’s only the beginning. The embassy outsources the actual collection of documents to another company which adds £20. Then there’s the £15 they charge to courier back the passport (a service which is not always on offer; if that’s the situation, then you just have to go back to the application center to pick up your passport, immediately doubling your travel costs). Then there’s the £15 for recent passport photographs. Then there’s the matter of traveling to the embassy or the visa application center itself. For most visa applications, I have to travel to London, which costs around £30, but I’m fortunate to live in a city from which London is relatively accessible. I can travel there and back in a day. I have friends who live in cities from which they need to fly to New York or Los Angeles if they want to get a Schengen visa. They need to book accommodation and incur all the other costs of a trip.
There is so much at stake, financially, when putting together an application. The smallest hiccup—if, for example, one of your documents doesn’t arrive in time, or if they deem an address on a hotel booking incomplete, or if they suddenly decide they need six months’ worth of bank statements instead of three (these have all happened to me)—and you might find yourself back to square one, potentially hundreds of pounds or dollars worse off. This obviously disincentivizes travel, especially for junior people whose salaries are often quite small. A strong norm favoring the reimbursement of visa-related travel costs would make planning work-related travel far less of a risk.
Norms should also shift around conference organizing. Some countries are more visa-accessible than others, and it would be good if the visa accessibility of a conference location were considered as part of what might make a location more or less desirable. But more generally, the timelines for conferences should be sensitive to the fact that it will only be possible for some would-be participants to attend if they have the chance to apply for a visa first. And that visa application will require them to, for example, have already made a hotel booking. And that’s assuming they’ve been able to book an appointment in the first place (right now, the waitlist for a Schengen visa appointment in London is at least three months). I would suggest that decisions about participants be made at least six months in advance.
A more ambitious suggestion, which I think is nonetheless worth taking seriously, is that academics’ travel budgets should be visa sensitive. Academics with weak passports will almost invariably incur more travel costs when making exactly the same trips as their more privileged peers, so their travel budgets will stretch less far.
Rachel and Tushar: Pursuing an academic career with a weak passport consistently imposes significant material, temporal, and emotional burdens. But passport privilege is an under-attended axis of (dis)advantage in the contemporary academy. Nonetheless, it strongly intersects with and compounds more familiar axes of disadvantage. Academics with weak passports will almost all be non-white. They will often be from non-Anglophone countries. And there is considerable overlap between countries with weak passports and countries with a history of being colonized by European powers. Academics committed to an ideal of diversity, as well as those committed to weaker ideals of equal opportunity ought to try to ameliorate the burdens that accrue to academics with weak passports. A wider conversation about how that might happen would be a good first step.
Rachel Fraser
Rachel Fraser is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at Exeter College. She works mainly in epistemology.
Tushar Menon
Tushar Menon is a Research Fellow at the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University. He is a philosopher of physics.
