On Passports, Visas and the Hindering of Movement
- Studio Nicola Fouché
- Jul 24
- 9 min read
[July 2026]
Hello dear friend! This is the monthly newsletter/blog of artist and illustrator Nicola Fouché. If you missed last month's one — Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur and the Gifts of a Multicultural Society — you can catch up on it here. If a friend forwarded you my newsletter/blog, and you would like to subscribe (it's free!), you can do so at the bottom of this newsletter or on my website. If you enjoy my stories and ramblings, please consider sharing and subscribing. Your support means the world. |
"progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything"
-George Bernard Shaw
Dear friends, family and fellow art lovers,
Let me start by saying that I should never have promised a second newsletter for June. Life happens and if I have to choose between life and writing my newsletter I will probably always choose life. My newsletters are labours of love in service to the life I lead, and so if I don't prioritise living my life I would in any case have nothing to write about. Still, many apologies, I do aspire to not promise things that I cannot deliver on.
During my recent visit to Kuala Lumpur — read about Malaysia and it’s multi-cultural history here — I found myself (once again) musing about migration, freedom of movement and our ability as a species to bar each other from aforementioned movement. Travelling and crossing borders, visa-and-stamp-filled passport in hand, always awakens the philosopher in me; and on this occasion I decided to pause and do a bit of writing on the topic.
One constant in the wandering, expatriate way of life, is the application of visas. Due to the delirious intricacies of visa bureaucracy I recently needed to leave Vietnam for a couple of days in order to obtain an exit stamp in my passport, so that an e-visa could be applied for, which I then had to wait to receive before I could re-enter the country. For those of us that grew up in South Africa and Namibia (and, I would venture to add, any other developing country) visa applications and the specific brand of governmental logic which rules this sector of societal life — a branch of logic which appears to be near universal (and definitely one which my Philosophy of Logic professor forgot to cover at university) — are familiar, if not always welcome, occurrences. Visas, borders and the specific nationality of a passport have all become serious obstructions to the free movement of people.
"...the passport in it’s current form is only about a hundred years old..."
In the writing of this newsletter I did a bit of research about the history of the passport, an item that is so ubiquitous with our modern way of life, that it is easy to forget (or not even know at all) that the passport in it’s current form is only about a hundred years old. Introduced as an emergency measure during the First World War for militarian and espionage reasons, and ratified into international law during the League of Nation’s passport conferences in the 1920s — despite a desire from the majority of the nations in attendance to abolish it — the passport in all it’s decorated, stamped and booklet-shaped-glory was granted status to remain. In the entirety of it’s 100 years — the Geneva Passport Conference in 1926 was the last failed hope for it’s abolition, which technically means that our highly contentious and deeply desired booklet of power/dead-weight (depending on where you are from) is a centenarian this year (congrats?) — it, and it’s sister, the Visa, have been hotly debated and researched topics.
The passport and it’s companion, the visa, have been called protectors of sovereignty and national security, reviled as instruments of discrimination and classism and have ultimately served as relatively successful blockades in the free movement of people. One of the leading historians on the passport, John Torpey, stated that the passport has allowed states to delineate between “insiders and outsiders”, something which is an important ingredient in the ““state-ness” of states” [1]. Other scholars argue that the passport allowed colonial ideals of state-and-personhood to be written into international law, and thus serves to perpetuate discrimination based on race and nationality by granting certain peoples and countries smoother global movement over others [2].
The scholar Yossi Harpaz argues that “given the instrumentalisation of citizenship to maintain global inequality, it is hardly surprising that those born into lower-ranking citizenships will seek to upgrade their status through whatever means available” [2], essentially turning the need for “better” citizenship into a never-ending striving for the supposed “good life”. Our willingness to delude ourselves into thinking that “there” is always better than “here” (barring active war-zones, of course) has become an all too comfortable pattern. And of course, what better way to ensure that people will show up in your country (either legally or illegally) than through barring them from doing so via impossible visa regulations or right-out restrictions; also known in psychology as the “forbidden fruit effect”.
"[Most people]...[assume] that because the world is a certain way for them, it must be the same way for everyone else"
It always amazes me when I meet people that hold those lotto-winning passports who are astounded by the lengthy visa applications which I, as a South African passport holder, needs to jump through in order to move about the world (decidedly un-freely and visa-encumbered). [As an interesting side note, the South African passport currently ranks 50th in terms of mobility according to the industry standard Henly Passport Index, wedged in snugly between Qatar at number 49 and Belize at 51. I am secretly convinced that our government holds a competition each year to see which state scandal they can make public or newly commit in order to drop us down another rung on the ladder (with the winning minister getting their very own, all expenses paid (by tax-payer money) luxury overseas, 5-star holiday to some or other snazzy location — on state business of course, to make sure it can be a tax write-off). ] Privilege, in all its shapes and forms, is most certainly the best material for blinders. Most people never think twice about their particular world-view, especially when privileged in one way or another, instead assuming that because the world is a certain way for them, it must be the same way for everyone else. In philosophy, this is also known as the The Fallacy of Composition, which is the same form of fallacious thinking that is at the heart of all discriminatory and judgemental thinking. Or, simply put, it’s the error in judgement we make when we mistake the part for the whole, or vice-versa. I believe this is also the reason why anti-immigration and anti-immigrant narratives are able to become so firmly rooted in the collective imagination: it’s easy, it’s unifying (in the worst possible way) and requires no effort on the part of the individual to think beyond the zeitgeist of their time.
As a result of the Green Mamba of a passport (as it is affectionately called back home) that I have the pleasure of holding, the most extreme thing that I have had to prove, to date, is that my mother is in fact my mother; my birth certificate (unabridged, naturally) was not enough. My mom had to go to a lawyer to get an affidavit (with the official seal!) to state that she, ID number so-and-so, passport number so-and-so, is in fact the mother of Nicola Fouché, ID number so-and-so, passport number so-and-so. Thankfully, this was sufficient at the time — had it not been it wouldn’t have surprised me if they requested a DNA test. I was applying for a long-term, multiple re-entry Schengen Visa, which has since expired, and since then (circa. 2019) the global immigration landscape has shifted dramatically. I shudder to think of the list of documents and declarations which will be required of me when I apply again next year, which I will need to do should I wish to visit the parts of my family that live in Germany. Ironically enough, simply visiting as a tourist requires less documents than when visiting family and relatives. The mind boggles.
"it is crucial to realise that before migration became legal or illegal, it was simply movement"
In my experience, the whole “the world is your oyster” saying is a bunch of crap. The world, in a geopolitical sense, is only your oyster if you come from the right country, hold the right passport, look the right way (even today still) and are rich in paper (degrees, certificates and money all included here). Then you can go wherever you please. For the majority of the world's population, especially those from developing countries (or worse still, from war-torn countries), the world is a meal in economy class, where you have a choice of beef, chicken or fish, and only if the rows ahead of you haven’t ordered all of the chicken yet. Now, I know this sounds terribly negative, but the upside to this is that once you have accepted that the world isn't a fair place and probably never will be (because humans are humans); the world does become much larger and more colourful. All of a sudden, the East, South East Asia, South America and the rest of Africa (just to name a few) opens up at your feet. They might not all offer the same level of modernity, comfort and labour laws with which you have grown up or have convinced yourself that the developed world can offer, but, they are bursting at the seams with a richness of life which only a good dose of chaos can create. And, for the first time in your life, as a South African at least, you will find that you can travel around and receive a visa on arrival (Love you, South East Asia❤️😘).
So, what does this all mean and why is it important? Well, given the tense global issues currently surrounding migration and the movement of people, I think it is crucial to realise that before migration became legal or illegal, it was simply movement and that the passport, along with the idea of the state, are both relatively recent man-made concepts. The writer and journalist, Sonia Shah, has said that "migration itself is not the crisis. It's part of the solution. It's how we adapt to change. This is how we survive on a dynamic, changing planet. It's how we've done it for all these years.”. As a species, we behave as though our right to our country and the land it’s borders —the lines of which turn out to be very flimsy and often changing, in fact — are drawn on, somehow belong immutably and incontestably to us, which of course, it does not. We simply had the hubris to say that it does and seem to be willing to commit terrible acts of cruelty and violence in service of this belief. How is it that humanity continuously behaves as though minds cannot be changed, stories cannot be adapted and beliefs cannot be reconsidered? George Bernard Shaw famously said that progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
Until next time.
All my love,
Nicola
References:
1. Caplan, J., & Torpey, J. (Eds.). (2001). The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Passport System: Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World.
2. SOOMRO A. People, Paper and Power: The Birth of the Passport in International Law. Asian Journal of International Law. 2024;14(2):358-385.
Further Reading:
1. The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shaw
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It surely is a Brave New World when I need to start ending off my newsletters/blogs with the statement that this newsletter/blog was fully written by me using my fallible human mind and hands. I have never, and will never use AI to write it for me, as the writing of these newsletters serve as a kind of month-in-review for me, and that is invaluable. The same goes for my artwork, illustrations and photographs. All images, photographs, illustrations and artworks which you see in my newsletters/blogs were created by me, by hand in the real world, unless otherwise credited. |
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