Deeper Histories of Immigration – #1 The Passport 🛂

Passports from across the world.

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while – educate broadly about the deeper history of some of the key immigration concepts and practices.
 
Why? To foster critical thinking, question systems of power, drive change. ✊
 
I want to start with something we all routinely and unthinkingly use all the time: the passport.
 
The dominant origin story of the passport goes like this:
 
➡ Travel document or letters of authorization to move from one jurisdiction to another have existed for centuries. Mainly required by “gypsies,” vagabonds, beggars, Jews and “other unknown or suspicious types.”
 
➡ Today’s passport and the way it’s used dates back to the late 19th century. Then, warring states introduced passports as required entry documents as an “emergency measure” during World War I.
 
➡ By 1919, pretty much all Western states had made passports a permanent requirement for entry.
 
This isn’t false in any way.
 
But there’s more: the idea of the passport as we know and use it today can be traced back to 1797 and German philosopher Johann Fichte's book Foundations of Natural Right 📜

Fichte argued:
 
🏛️ The state doesn’t have the means to maintain a “well-ordered” society. People with shady moral character, the “underclass,” and criminals can move around between territories and wreak all kinds of havoc.
 
🙈 They easily get away with it because there’s no way to easily identify them.
 
Shit, what to do, what we gonna do? Thought Fichte.
 
🚨 This, he said: The state must instate a well-ordered police force. This police force must be able to identify EVERY PERSON AT ANY TIME.
 
How? "Everyone must always carry a passport with him, issued by the nearest authority and containing a precise description of his person; this applies to everyone, regardless of class or rank." And this passport must carry the person’s realistic recognizable portrait 🎨
 
There you have it. The idea of the passport as we know it today.
 
The passport was designed to be a strict population control mechanism: people, their exact location, their characteristics, and their physical appearance must be legible and made available to state and police powers at all times (past, present, and future).
 
State’s slowly implemented this idea throughout the 19th century.
 
Upper class people 🎩 hated the idea of the passport. As late as the early 20th century they said: Having a passport = accusation of bad character.
 
As nationalist fervor took hold of large swaths of citizens, states successfully turned passport into a source of national pride, a mark of national belonging, and highly valued commodity, while ever expanding the use of the passport as population control.
 
Today the passport is a crucial element in people’s lives and embodies the power to both include and separate people. But let’s not forget that it still carries with it its fundamental idea as a surveillance tool.