What would our world be if did not have passports?
In the early twentieth century, many countries abandoned the passport system, and, perhaps, familiar to us documents, without which we cannot imagine the journey would have disappeared altogether. How would the world economy if this happened?
“What would we, the British, if not could drive from London to crystal Palace or Manchester to Stockport without a passport or a policeman following behind us? Rest assured, we are not half as thankful to God as I should be, for our national privileges.”
So wrote the English writer named John Gadsby, travelling around Europe in the mid-nineteenth century.
This was before the modern passport system, to a pain familiar to anyone who ever in your life traveled abroad.
You’re standing in line, and then stretch its standardized book the man in the uniform, raising your face to compare it with a photo where you look younger and slimmer.
Perhaps she or he asks you about your journey, while the computer checks your name with lists of potential terrorists.
However, until relatively recently, passports were not so commonplace.
In essence, they served as a threat: it was a letter from some influential person, require to ensure free passage of the traveller and not that will bad.
The concept of a passport as security assurances rooted in biblical times. And protection was a privilege and not a right.
Gentlemen like Gadsby who wanted to obtain a passport, required personal relationships with the relevant government Minister.
As discovered by Gadsby, the most zealous bureaucratic nation of continental Europe saw in the passport the potential to become a vehicle for social and economic control.
In the last century, the French needed not only in order to leave the country, but to travel from town to town.
“Arbitrary invention”
If now the rich countries are tightening control of their borders to protect the country from unskilled labor, before the municipal authorities used this control in order to produce skilled workers.
As the years passed, and thanks to Railways and steamships to travel faster and cheaper. According to Martin Lloyd in his book ‘Passport’ (The Passport), documents that restrict the right of movement, was not popular.
French Emperor Napoleon III shared the admiration of Gatsby more calm — British — approach to this issue. He called the passport the “arbitrary invention” and abolished in 1860.
France was not alone in this. More and more countries have either formally abolished passport requirements, or simply ceased to follow them, at least in peacetime.
In the 1890-ies in America you can go without a passport — however, you better it was to be white.
Some South American countries have enshrined the right to free movement without passports in their constitutions. In China and Japan, foreigners needed the passport only for travel within the country.
By the beginning of XX century in the country that required passports for entry or exit, could be counted on the fingers. It seemed that soon there may not be any at all.
The immigration crisis
What would the modern world be if it happened?
One September morning in 2015, Abdullah Kurd, his wife and two young sons got into a boat on the coast of the Turkish city of Bodrum, in the hope to swim four kilometers through the Aegean sea and get to the Greek island of KOs.
But the boat capsized in the open sea. Abulle managed to survive, clinging to the boat, but his wife and children drowned.
The three-body Alan Kurdi washed up on the shore of Turkey, where he photographed the correspondent of the Turkish Agency. The photograph became a symbol of the migration crisis that shook Europe all summer.
Family Kurdi did not want to stay in Greece. In the end they were hoping to start a new life in Vancouver, where the sister of Abdullah Teem works as a hairdresser.
Boat to KOs is not the easiest way to travel from Turkey to Canada.
Abdullah got was money: 4,000 EUR (4 460 dollars) which he paid to the carrier, it could buy plane tickets for the whole family — if only they had the correct passports.
Because the Syrian government has denied citizenship to ethnic Kurds, Kurdi did not have passports. But even if they had Syrian documents, they would not be able to sit on a plane flying to Canada. If the passport was issued by Sweden, or Slovakia, or Singapore, or Samoa, it could happen.
It may seem natural that the name of the country on our passport determines where we can travel and where to work — at least, according to the law.
Discrimination?
However, this relatively recent historical discovery, and in some ways it is quite strange.
Many countries prohibit discrimination on the working characteristics that people cannot change — gender, age, sexual orientation or skin color.
The passport, of course, can change: over 250 000 dollars, for example, you can buy a citizenship of St. Kitts and Nevis.
But for the most part our passport depends on our parents and our place of birth. And this is not choose.
Nevertheless clamor to judge a man by his character and not the color of the passport, not heard.
With the fall of the Berlin wall less than three decades, immigration has again become fashionable.
Donald trump calls for the construction of a wall on the border of USA and Mexico.
The Schengen area is bursting at the seams under the pressure of migration crisis.
European leaders are frantically trying to separate the refugees from “economic migrants,” based on the fact that a man who is not saved from persecution, and just wants to find a better job or to live better, to let the country is not worth it.
Politically, the logic of migration constraints, the challenge becomes harder.
Winners and losers
Economic logic, however, is in the opposite direction. In theory, when the performance goes up with demand, the volume of production increases.
In practice, the outcome of any migration process there are winners and losers, but according to research, the winners all a lot more.
In most successful countries, according to some estimates, more than 80% of the population benefit from the influx of migrants.
So why is the idea of open borders is not so popular?
For various practical and cultural reasons to manage migration can be difficult: if public services are not updated fast enough to cope with the flow of new arrivals, or if there are irreconcilable ideological conflicts between migrants and the local population.
In addition, the minuses of migration, as a rule, more than the pros.
Imagine that a few Mexicans come to America and are willing to pick fruit for less pay than Americans. The benefit is a small reduction of prices on fruit for all — encompasses too many people and too small to notice, while the costs — the loss of jobs some portion of Americans — give rise to noisy discontent.
You can make the losses of the losers was offset by taxes and budgetary spending. However, as a rule, so it doesn’t work.
The economic logic of migration often looks more attractive when we are not talking about crossing the state borders.
Security issues
In the 1980-ies, when Britain is mired in recession, and some regions of the country suffered from it more than others, the Minister for employment Norman Tebit offered (or seemed to all that offered) to the unemployed “get on your bike” and go to look for work.
Some economists predict that world output would have doubled if everyone could sit on the bike and work anywhere.
This suggests that the modern world would be much richer if passports “extinct” in the early twentieth century. There is one simple reason why this did not happen: interfered the First world war.
When security concerns prevailed over freedom of movement, the authorities imposed new tough measures of control and did not want to part with them when peace came.
In 1920 the newly founded League of Nations convened the “International conference on passports, customs formalities and tickets,” which, in fact, was invented passports, what we use now.
According to the results of the conference in 1921 introduced the following requirements: passport must be the size of 15.5 cm by 10.5 cm, consist of 32 pages to have a cardboard cover and contain a photo. The format has since changed surprisingly little.
As John Gadsby, a person with a passport the right colors can only enjoy his good fortune.