The Politics of Travel and Mobility Inequality

For some people, all that is required to travel abroad is choosing a destination, booking a ticket and departing. Yet for millions of passport holders from developing countries, the journey begins long before the airport.

The journey starts with long queues outside visa application centres, hunting for limited appointment slots, piles of personal documents to be submitted, bank statements required to prove financial means, and considerable visa application fees. Time, energy and money are sacrificed simply to convince the destination country that they are worthy of being granted entry. Some even have to check the state of political relations between their home country and their destination. And it does not end there: lengthy immigration processes at the airport, with barriers separating holders of strong passports from those with weak ones from third countries. We must face questions from immigration officers seeking reassurance that we really will return home, that we will not stay and work in their country.

Ironically, all of that effort can vanish within five minutes of an interview at an embassy or through a single rejection notice without clear explanation. Behind every visa queue lies both hope and anxiety. There are people who stake their savings, sacrifice their leave from work, and even rearrange their life plans just to obtain a sticker in their passport.

Travelling abroad is not always synonymous with holidays or healing. For some, cross-border mobility is a long, exhausting, expensive and often discriminatory process. Travel is not merely a tourist activity, but an experience that reveals how access to move around the world is distributed unequally. Travelling is not just about sightseeing and having fun; travelling is a political matter.

In this era of globalisation, where globalisation has created a borderless world, where modern technology and transport allow anyone, anywhere to move, study and work freely across borders, data, goods and capital flow freely — but not people. We are constrained by passport status, visas and border controls. Mobility, which ought to be a natural right of human beings, is instead determined by the passport we hold.

Data from the 2026 Henley Global Passport Index shows Singapore at the top as the country with the strongest passport, with 192 visa-free destinations, making it the strongest passport in ASEAN. Japan follows with 188 visa-free destinations. On the other hand, there are countries with only 30 to 70 visa-free destinations, such as Indonesia, which occupies 67th place with 71 visa-free destinations. This reveals an enormous disparity.

This stands in stark contrast to the global narrative of mobility, global connectivity and an increasingly borderless world. Globalisation has yet to deliver equal freedom of movement. A mobility gap remains, rooted in citizenship and a country’s geopolitical position. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization’s (UNWTO) 2023 report on openness to tourists, the Asia-Pacific region has a considerable percentage of openness to tourists, at 46 per cent.

North America, meanwhile, is the most restrictive region in the world. 2023 data shows that developing countries have the highest level of openness regarding entry visa requirements for tourism, with a score of 43 on the Tourism Visa Openness Index, while 42 per cent of the world’s population requires a conventional visa to enter. For developed countries, the openness index is only 27 per cent, and 69 per cent of the world’s population requires a conventional visa to enter.

The opportunity to move is still largely determined by geographical luck — where a person happens to be born — rather than by their capacity or effort as an individual. On the one hand, the world champions openness and global connectivity. On the other, freedom of movement remains a privileged right distributed unevenly. Mobility is not merely a matter of travel but a matter of power. This is visible in the concept of mobility justice, whereby mobility is a political commodity and a reflection of power. Mobility becomes a right negotiated through political relations between states.

This injustice is reflected in what is known as passportism. The term refers to the tendency of the global mobility system to judge a person by the passport they hold rather than by their identity or purpose of travel. Passportism is the assumption that passports from Global South countries are synonymous with immigration risk, overstaying or security threats, so their holders must undergo far more complicated verification processes than holders of Global North passports. Simply put, passportism is a ‘fear of third-world passports’. From this, we can see that equality and justice in mobility have yet to be realised in this era of globalisation.

Today, travel is an increasingly politically charged issue. Policies still rooted in global hierarchy and colonialism have become normalised. If the narrative that ‘everyone is free to move’ continues to be believed, then various forms of mobility injustice will increasingly be regarded as normal. Visa rejections, travel restrictions, discrimination based on nationality, or even outright discriminatory policies will be seen as ordinary procedural matters, when in fact they are forms of global inequality.

We therefore need to change how we view globalisation and mobility, and to examine the extent to which our right to move is regulated. We must recognise that even travel is political, in which policy and government decisions play a major role in our lives and life choices — something that deserves close attention to ensure the accountability of our government.