Until this week, I had no idea that there was an official ranking for passports. I knew that my green South African one isn’t very highly regarded, but that was mostly based on personal experience and the considerable expense of having to get a visa for pretty much everywhere I travel. Turns out there is an authoritative ranking of 199 of the world’s passports according to the number of destinations their holders can access without a prior visa. The Henley Passport Index is based on exclusive data from the International Air Transport Association, described by The Guardian as the largest, most accurate travel information database.
Passports are on my mind because I’m writing this from Naples, and it’s a bit of a miracle that I’ve made it here. I had to juggle submitting my passport to get a Schengen visa with needing my passport to travel to Kenya. A stressful procedure, in that one slight delay would have meant missing one of those trips. Kenya, of course, is one of those countries that don’t require a visa for South Africans.
South Africa is 53rd on the passport index, with 102 visa-free destinations. South Africans generally seem to feel that the world is picking on them when it comes to travelling internationally, though some of the ones I see complaining in airports appear to believe that they should be treated as honorary Europeans, so it’s hard to feel any sympathy.
It’s anecdotal, but we’ve probably all experienced the frustrated entitlement of a certain type of South African, who can’t understand why they get treated like the hoi polloi of the world when their dual-passport friends are just whisked through without a visa. It’s because you’re an African, Nigel! You aren’t allowed to embrace it, but you also can’t escape it.
Sad, as my friend Donald says. But let me not stray down that cul-de-sac of stereotypes. Suffice to note that there are some negatives when it comes to Africans travelling to the minority world. Though, having said that, and to our shame, there are similar negatives when travelling to African destinations. Most African countries require a visa for South Africans, and we reciprocate that hostility.
Apropos of that, at 53rd on the list, South Africa is the third-highest African country, after the Seychelles (26th, with access to 155 countries visa-free or with visa on arrival) and Mauritius (29th, access to 148 countries). Botswana (63rd) and Namibia (68th) complete our top five. In 2006 our passport was 36th on the list of countries, so we’ve suffered a fairly steep decline since then.
If you’re wondering which lucky citizens are welcomed with open arms around the world, the top five passports are those of Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Germany and Italy. I stumbled across all this passport information because it’s in the news at the moment: according to The Guardian, “for the first time in two decades, the US has dropped out of the world’s top 10 most powerful passports, marking a significant dethroning for the global superpower … The US passport now ranks 12th globally, sharing the position with Malaysia. Just last year, the US was in seventh place, before slipping to 10th in July of this year. Ten years ago, it was at the top of the list.”
Ah, how the mighty continue to fall, either because they’ve been pushed, or because they’ve jumped. A bit of both, one suspects. And even though the US ranks at 12th, there are actually 36 countries ahead of it, as there are a lot of ties for positions higher up the list. If you’re interested, the bottom five countries are Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Afghans are able to visit just 28 destinations visa-free.
One of the reasons countries move higher up the rankings, according to Henley, is reciprocity. It points out that while US passport holders can access 180 destinations visa-free, the US itself allows only 46 other nationalities to enter its borders without a visa. I’m not sure quite why I find this so annoying, but I do. It smacks of privilege in a way that has profound real-world impact. I’m sure there are loads of metrics behind it, but the appellation “shithole country” still rankles.
Passports are on my mind because I’m writing this from Naples, and it’s a bit of a miracle that I’ve made it here
This “dramatic fall in ranking”, as The Guardian puts it, is apparently driving Americans to want to embrace dual citizenship, “signalling that standalone US citizenship may not be the superpower status it once was”. Peter J Spiro, a professor at Temple University Law School, is quoted as saying: “In coming years, more Americans will be acquiring additional citizenships in whatever way they can. Multiple citizenship is being normalised in American society.” And according to The Guardian, “while it may be a bit of an exaggeration, as one social media poster recently put it, ‘dual citizenship is the new American dream’”. I thought a despotic monarchy was the new American dream, but I guess they can have a few dreams now that they’ve entirely bifurcated their reality.
Gabon is one of the few countries (along with Benin, Brazil, Iran, Ghana, Venezuela and Russia) where South Africans don’t require a visa, but Americans do. It’s not entirely relevant to this column, but it does give me pleasure to have discovered that the old Gabonese passport (phased out from 2013), was embossed with a round, golden image of a woman breastfeeding her child. Given the ban on showing nipples on Facebook and Instagram (female nipples, of course, not innocent male ones), one can only imagine what sort of culture shock the beleaguered guardians of the US’s borders at immigration must have endured.
While queuing at the global visa companies that now appear to be the gatekeepers for visa applications to a range of countries, South Africans can at least take heart that we don’t need exit visas. According to Wikipedia, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all have an exit visa requirement for foreign workers as part of their work visa sponsorship system. When a foreign worker’s employment period ends, they must secure clearance from their employer stating that they have satisfactorily fulfilled the terms of their employment contract, or that their services are no longer needed.
One has to admire the creativity of taking the difficulty of having to get permission to enter a country and doubling down by also making it difficult to leave. According to Migrant-Rights.Org, this is used in several ways to exploit workers. For example, employers can sometimes issue final exit visas in the middle of a contract, forcing workers to leave the country quickly and circumventing established labour law protections or dispute resolution processes. And for workers declared “no longer needed”, the exit visa can be withheld to punish them, particularly in cases where there’s a disagreement or perceived slight, or to force them into accepting unfavourable conditions.
Ultimately, though, one can view visa requirements as a measure of what place a country occupies in the global psyche. There’s a reason, besides the fact that someone is touching us on our privilege, that South Africans become angry at restrictions on travel that seem unfair when we look at other countries. We understand that this is an indication of how people see our worth as global citizens. Which is why the decline in the power of the US passport is interesting. Let’s check in again next year to see if it has managed to claw back some respectability, or fallen even more out of favour.
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