Japan must be doing something well... I don't know if passport ranking is included in any human development index, but somehow being able to negotiate diplomatically with large numbers of "others" is evidence for an advanced society (and in some ways a role model if we ever want to reach some sort of pax humana)
Being rich, highly educated, low in criminality, low in illegal emigration means that other nations are more willing to welcome you in. Think of who you would welcome into your own home and they map pretty homomorphically to the same set of rules you would set at the national level i.e. probably someone who won't steal your things, is good company, won't break your rules, or overstay their welcome.
Not diplomacy or government action, it simply helps if you are the sort of nation whose travelling supporters volunteer to help clean up their mess in stadiums after their matches in international tournaments. Contrast that with away supporters of other nations (looking at you England :D)
In the interest of moving the Overton window, I've yet to hear a good, logical reason why we don't allow the free movement of people between administrative states.
From a US perspective, I think it’s because people enter on travel visas and do not leave.
I had a coworker from India who was a naturalized citizen for 5-10 years and he was trying to get travel visas for his parents to visit. He had applied many times and been denied each time. We talked about it and he said that the reason given was that the state department considered his parents a risk to not leave at the end of their visit. Comically, when I complained about how that was wrong and his parents would obviously go back he said “100% they will stay, I don’t really blame the visa people. My in laws stayed on a travel visa years ago and are still here.”
There’s also a reciprocity issue that’s sort of chicken and egg. India didn’t grant visas easily back in 2005 because the US didn’t grant their citizens visas.
The question isn't that much "why don't we accept all travel visas" but "why don't we accept all immigrants".
People are talking about the "risk that they stay" like it's something bad to have too many immigrants. And it ended up like some common sense idea. But what if it's not?
Did California or New York suffer from getting people moving from all the "country side" state? Did the US suffer from their immigration waves when they had open borders, and all you needed to get in was a medical exam on Ellis Island?
I think there’s pretty common and clear data on why unlimited immigration is harmful to the receiving country [0] (tl;dr; lowers wages and increases costs for non-immigrants).
The question is whether it’s worth it for the obvious benefit to immigrants. So it may be a net benefit when factoring the improvements to people who immigrate in.
The US benefited greatly from open immigration 100+ years ago because they weren’t that great and there wasn’t much to lose. So it’s apples to oranges of open immigration then to open immigration now. Back then there were no government services and land was literally given out for free.
Same thing happened to my country. In the 90's, the US was a lot more welcoming. But because a lot of tourists stayed, it is a lot harder now to get a tourist visa.
Just move to any place that's had its workforce, welfare system and social order decimated by impoverished immigrants and given enough time to amass some awful experiences, you'll be able to list your own reasons.
Many parts of the UK, and half of mainland Europe? Was ongoing and in decline in some places, but become worse since the Ukraine crisis which has exacerbated, as both wealthy and poor are arriving en masse straining limited resources.
Sure, in a country with unused land, untapped resources, and infrastructure that can easily adapt, it could (potentially) result in growth and prosperity for all. But much of overcrowded Europe doesn't meet the prerequisites.
How do migrants decimate the workforce? Wouldn't they add to the workforce? (Though I do agree that eg the German policy to ban asylum seekers from working while at the same time enrolling them in welfare is asinine. The devil finds work for bored young man.)
Enrolling migrants in the welfare system is a choice. It's easy to restrict the welfare system to citizens only.
Social order is a bit too nebulous to make a comment.
Migrants from poorer countries have lower standards of living, and often able to claim exclusive subsidies. When a job market is saturated with people willing to do jobs for way less, the existing workforce gets pushed out.
Country level this mightn't change much initially, as the existing workforce moves where they maintain their income. But on a local level it's disruptive, and if not held in check flows up to country-level. (A "brain-drain".)
Labour compensation is mostly decided by labour productivity. Many software engineers are so in love with their craft, that they would work for free. Instead, they are handsomely rewarded, because (in the limit) competitions bids up their wages to their level of productivity.
(Conversely, just because I am used to a high standard of living, doesn't mean that I will automatically gain high pay.)
Does your theory about newcomers pushing people out of the existing workforce also apply to the situation in the 20th century in the US when women started having careers outside the home? Why or why not?
It's not a theory, it's experience - and not just mine.
The situations in the US, especially historically, are very different to those in other parts of the world, especially now.
Yet, even in the US, I see even illegal immigrants right now are being given all manner of bonuses and incentives - free mobile phones, for a recently well-publicised example.
In the UK and Europe immigrants are given free housing and other often monetary benefits not available to ordinary citizens. This, plus their willingness to live in, for example, roach-infested council housing for free or cheap (in the UK), gives them a huge edge in the job market that slowly decimates an area.
There have been very hard times for businesses recently, what do you think they will do when a person turns up offering to do the same job for much less?
Not in my area of work, but in terms of more fundamental employment. All the local faces you see begin changing to those of immigrants, and the entire dynamic and general safety of the small village you once called home shift into something completely alien. Generally, crime goes up, higher-end businesses and talent leave, and the place becomes a ghetto compared to what it was before.
It's not about immigration per se, it's just about the amount of it.
It's accelerated all over Europe recently. It's even headlining the news regularly here as "the migration crisis".
It's not a controversial or unusual thing to think that migrants are causing problems. Historically they're one constant thing that has in Europe.
It's also not at all theoretical - outside perhaps of the safe bubble of comfort those in less volatile situations end up thinking is a universal reality manufacturable by their ideologies.
It's a reality sure, but it's not universal. And not all ideologies work everywhere and when applied to all people.
I have heard this claim before, but I haven't been able to find any strong evidence of this. Can you provide some links to places this has happened to? Developed countries specifically.
If you're looking at country-level data it may be too broad and so harder to identify, only one order away from pointlessly looking for the same effect in "the whole world". You need granularity, where the effects are seen.
For example, small UK villages presently having emotion-filled community meetings unable to cope with the negative effect of sudden influxes of 1000's of allotted refugees radically changing every aspect of their home.
But why require evidence, when the basic math has it:
You have x number of people with y number of resources. What will happen if you increase x without also increasing y?
Because of the asymmetry of prosperity? Movement is gonna be one-sided from a lot of less prosperous countries. I think this list clearly reflects that: you are ranked higher if movement is close to equilibrium (you have a country lots of people also want to move to or not a lot of people want to leave).
1. Large-scale free movement of people between administrative states is called "an invasion". Why doesn't Ukraine just let Russians walk into Kiev?
2. Because it would lead to further concentration and centralization of power and money and influence and insanely expensive real estate in the hands of even fewer.
3. Because it is nice to live in a community of people that speak the same language, have a shared culture, and can interact according to some shared norms. I understand this is already lost in Western urban centers, so cultural homogeneity not valued anymore. But those who have it, value it.
> I understand this is already lost in Western urban centers
I don't want to accuse anyone of lying to you on the internet ... but as I've had no problem interacting according to shared norms (with varied languages and varied cultures) in many* Western urban centers, I will suggest you may wish to reconsider the veracity of your sources.
* eg.
Amsterdam
Barcelona
Boston
Edinburgh
Hamburg
London
Los Angeles
Milan
New York
Paris
Salzburg
Seattle
Vancouver
Source: I was born in Toronto, and have been to many of the Western cities you mentioned, and didn’t know anything else until I moved to culturally homogeneous Ukraine. The difference is night and day. Life is just more meaningful and I have a much stronger relationship with people living around me.
I would prefer Bangladesh to Toronto anytime (and yes I have actually travelled extensively in Bangladesh, and I am NOT ethnically Bengali) just because of the cultural homogeneity. There is no place on Earth I hate more than Dubai because of the cultural potpourri. Maybe it’s just me, but I strongly prefer cultural homogeneity over everything else, even risking my life in a warzone right now (Kyiv) because I love being part of a well-defined centuries-old cultural heritage.
Fair enough; good luck! I hope to visit Одеса* some day (but not as a war zone).
* in my head-canon, the "swarthy moldovan" of Смуглянка fame is not necessarily an ethnic moldovan, but possibly a vineyard worker from the Moldavanka slum (as it was then) of Odesa.
1. Immigrants are a net positive for the welfare state because you don't have to pay for their education and all their young years where they don't produce anything. They come ready to work and pay taxes.
2. Expats who only speak English and not the local language are the one who have no trouble getting a visa anyway. To take the example of France, the countries from where people want to migrate (and can't even come with a tourist visa) are mostly African French speaking countries.
Man, did Zweig ever have an ear for lyrically lush phrasing. His and Garet Garrett's polemics against strident nationalism unfortunately fell upon deaf ears.
Well considering one general way of defining the purpose of a nation state is to provide for the security, economic/social/public welfare, and administration of justice for its citizens - its hard to see mass migration from certain states to others as aligning with those obligations.
The current politics around this issue is not simply about free movement. It is about economics. For example, it is easy to travel to Denmark, using Denmark as an example of an "enlightened" state. However, if you intend to stay for more than 3 months, you must secure work/residency before even arriving. State benefits are also available only to citizens and others of certain legal status, with more limited benefits available to EU citizens.
The actual question that is being debated is allowing free movement into this country while at the same time providing full benefits (welfare, housing, health, etc) without requiring job/work permit/etc.
The same reason that has been true since the beginning of civilization - resources are limited.
Also, not all cultures align. Hundreds of millions of people are very much against some of the values that you may hold dear. If enough of them become your neighbors, you may be forced to align to their values.
Sure, I can't imagine it being too difficult to compromise the keys for some first world country.
But there's no need to bother, you won't get busted at an airport because the chip of your passport failed. If they were suspicious, they'd just go through a document verification checklist and see if your passport has the correct physical features. Check out the PRADO glossary for example https://www.consilium.europa.eu/prado/en/prado-glossary/prad...
A bunch of EU countries still issue non-biometric passports, even if with limited validity periods.
Same reason you do not invite local “unhoused” meth addict to live in your spare bedroom. There are significant negative consequences from crime to destruction of high trust society.
I recently searched for passport ranking and there are several and they do - of course - not agree. The first three search results for me are [1][2][3] but there are certainly more and the different results are due to the metric used - for example, is visa-free as good as 90 days visa-free and if not, how are they weighted?
A clickable map of this with lines to the visa free travel countries would be a brilliant visualisation.
Sadly they don't have a downloadable form of the data. There is however an internal API that returns nice JSON, it looks like they built in provision for maps and coordinate, but never populated that data.
Wish the data was available in a downloadable form. Would be interesting to see which combinations of passports gives you the best access together.
For example, if you could hold two arbitrary passports at the same time, which two would give access to most countries (feels like a kind of graph covering problem to calculate).
Countries usually decide whether to grant visa-free travel based on the likelihood that travellers from that country will become illegal immigrants. For Nepal, this is considered very likely. For North Korea, it's exceedingly unlikely, because it's so difficult to leave the country in the first place, those who are allowed to leave are carefully vetted, and their family back home is essentially held hostage to ensure they return.
Sure, but illegal immigration is hardly the only reason for visas (many countries have concerns over organised crime for example), and it ranks well below other countries that have similar reputations for illegal immigration. For example Congo and South Sudan rank higher and given the refugee numbers from those countries I'd imagine they are a large source of illegal immigration too.
Funny enough, the countries where legal movement is harder appear to have a lot more problems with illegal overstays. This is because the legal system keeps people in various kinds of limbo which automatically put them in an out of status state. If countries could process legal visas fast enough, illegal movement would drop like a rock since most ineligible people will just take the denial and move to a different place.
Weighting the access countries by these three factors would be very interesting: Land mass (access to space), GDP per capita (access to human capital), aggregate GDP (access to markets).
The blurb above the table notes that the ranking is "the number of destinations their holders can access without a prior visa," and that it is based on data from IATA. Basically, the same data as used by airlines to assess documentation requirements before allowing passengers to board international flights.
The UK is above Belgium because, according to their data, a British passport allows visa free access to 187 destinations, while a Belgian passport only allows access to 186 destinations.
>> Kazakhstan
For what's worth Russia said at some point last year that Kazakhstan is not a real country...it's actually part of Russia. If the Ukraine invasion works out for Russia(highly unlikely) I'm pretty sure these countries will be next.
The ranking should more appropriately be called "tourist passport ranking", "visitor passport ranking" or something the like. It's a misnomer to call it a "passport ranking" without any qualifiers as this is based on visa exemptions for short-term visitors only.
Japan and Singapore win it every year because apart from being able to enter all the "usual" Western countries and tourist destinations, they are allowed 14-day visa-free entry to China and some other places that typically require visas from everyone else. But then, for China (at least pre-COVID), many other nationals are allowed 5-day visa-free stay while "transiting." And US citizens can get multiple-entry 10-year visas. So the difference in practice isn't that big.
Visitor visas in general are hardly difficult to obtain. For example Germany is a notch above other EU member states because it has visa-free entry to Namibia (perhaps in reciprocity for the generous German aid directed there), whereas for passport holders from most other countries it's a question of paying a nominal fee ("tourist tax"). Although the amount itself is steep (€90 last I checked), obtaining a visa there is unlikely to prove an obstacle.
It would be more interesting to see a ranking comparing access to the best job markets instead. But then the winners would obviously be EU/EEA member state and US passports, alongside some others that grant a pathway to one of those (Canada, Australia, ...).
Yet another way of looking at it is that the "best" passport is the one that grants the best consular protection for their holders abroad, and here the winners would either be the US (willing and capable of doing more than any other country to get their citizens out of trouble) or some countries that are nominally neutral and non-threatening to anyone (so that holding their passport does not paint you as a target in adversary countries), while still being able to flex their diplomatic muscle if need be (Switzerland? Sweden? The latter used to have the most embassies in the world I think.).
Finally, some passports have anti-features. For example the US citizenship is great if living in the US but can be a burden while abroad due to the need to file taxes even if non-resident, and the FATCA regulations making it difficult to even open a bank account in another country (extra reporting burden on the bank). Singapore is not even a democracy and has mandatory conscription for citizens by birth (perhaps not a gift you'd want to make to your children).
I would like to see a ranking considering all of the above as well but I doubt that's going to happen (unless I made one myself I guess): since the simplistic approach is enough to win the news cycle, why would anyone bother. It's similar to all those city rankings always topped by the most boring places that nominally check all the right boxes but few people aspire to move to.
