The Politics of Travel and Mobility Inequality

For some people, going abroad simply involves choosing a destination, booking a ticket, and departing. However, for millions of passport holders from developing countries, the journey begins long before they reach the airport. It starts with long queues at visa application centres, the hunt for limited appointment slots, piles of personal documents to submit, bank statements to prove financial capability, and significant application fees. Time, energy, and money are sacrificed just to convince a destination country that they are worthy of entry. Some must also consider the political relationship between their home country and the destination. The process does not end there; lengthy immigration checks at the airport and barriers separating holders of strong and weak passports await. Travellers must face questions from immigration officers to prove they genuinely intend to return home and will not settle or work in the country. Ironically, all this effort can be undone in a five-minute embassy interview or by a single notification of rejection without clear reason. Behind every visa queue lies hope and anxiety, with people risking their savings, sacrificing work leave, and rearranging life plans just for a sticker in their passport. Travelling abroad is not always synonymous with holidays or leisure. For many, cross-border mobility is a long, exhausting, expensive, and often discriminatory process. Travel is not merely a tourist activity; it is an experience that reveals how unequally the access to move around the world is distributed. Travel is a political issue. In this era of globalisation, which has supposedly created a borderless world where modern technology and transport allow anyone to move, study, and work freely across countries, data, goods, and capital flow freely, but humans do not. We are constrained by passport status, visas, and border controls. Mobility, which should be a fundamental human right, is instead determined by the passport we hold. Data from the 2026 Henley Global Passport Index shows Singapore at the top with visa-free access to 192 destinations, followed by Japan with 188. In contrast, some countries have access to only 30 to 70 destinations. Indonesia ranks 67th with visa-free access to just 71 destinations, highlighting a massive inequality. This reality contradicts the globalisation narrative of unrestricted mobility and global connectivity. Globalisation has not delivered equal freedom of movement. The mobility gap is rooted in citizenship and a country’s geopolitical standing. A 2023 UNWTO report on tourism openness indicates that the Asia and Pacific region has a relatively high openness percentage at 46%, while North America is the most restrictive region globally. Data from 2023 shows that developing countries have the highest level of openness regarding tourist visa requirements, with a score of 43 on the Tourism Visa Openness Index, where 42% of the world’s population requires a conventional visa to enter. For developed countries, the openness index is only 27%, with 69% of the world’s population needing a conventional visa. The opportunity to move is still largely determined by geographical luck, or where a person is born, rather than by individual capacity or effort. While the world campaigns for openness and global connectivity, freedom of movement remains a privilege distributed unevenly. Mobility is not just a matter of travel but a matter of power. This is evident in the concept of mobility justice, where mobility is a political commodity and a reflection of power, negotiated through political relations between states. This injustice is reflected in what is termed ‘passportism’, a system that judges individuals based on the passport they hold rather than their identity or purpose of travel. Passportism assumes that holders of passports from the Global South inherently pose immigration risks, overstay threats, or security dangers, subjecting them to far more complex verification processes than those from the Global North. In essence, it is a fear of third-world passports. This shows that equality and justice in mobility have yet to be realised in the era of globalisation. Today, travel is an increasingly political issue. Policies rooted in global hierarchies and colonialism have become normalised. If the narrative that ‘everyone can move freely’ continues to be believed, various forms of mobility injustice will be seen as normal. Visa rejections, travel restrictions, and discrimination based on citizenship will be viewed as mere procedural matters, when in fact they are manifestations of global inequality. Therefore, we must change our perspective.