July 03, 2019

Are passports still relevant in the modern world?

located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

Russian passports occupy the 51st place in a rating of the most convenient travel documents, according to a report by the Henley & Partners, published earlier this week.

Russian nationals are able to visit 116 countries visa-free in 2019, which is four countries less than in 2018. (Surprisingly, Syria is one of those countries – despite the fact that Russia provides military, diplomatic and economic support to Damascus). Afghanistan occupies the bottom position in the rating, with only 25 countries allowing its nationals to enter without visa formalities.

A country's place in that rating, be it on the bottom or on the top, gives its passport holders little reason to celebrate or grieve in practical terms, says head of the Eurasian Network of Political Studies Vitaly Merkushev.

"Visa formalities have been an anachronism, remnants of the Cold War era. Nowadays, all cross-border movements can be traced and controlled electronically. Paper visas and paper passports have been obsolete", he says. When it comes to Russia, it behaves reciprocally, introducing or lifting visa requirements for the countries which introduce or wave visas for Russian nationals.

Some countries in Eastern Europe, like Ukraine and Georgia, lifted visa requirements for the U.S. and Canadian citizens unilaterally, only to demonstrate their political alliance and good will. This shows that visa regimes in the modern world have been a political tool, demonstration of amicable or unfriendly attitudes between countries, Merkushev says. "Traditional visas and passports have lost their primary function of control over migration flows or prevention of terrorism. And they lost them forever", he foresees.

Traditional border control fails to tackle the tasks it is supposed to tackle: to prevent the entry of non-grata persons, head of the Center for Political and Economic Studies Vasily Koltashov agrees. "All the measures like checking travel documents with the databases of criminal police, security and migration services, sharing information about residential permits and so on – could be applied only to the persons who enter a country legally, through the border checkpoints.

But such people cause no headache for the authorities anyway. The problem is how to control the migrants who do not bother to apply for visas at all", he says. Amusingly enough, not only illegal migrants do not bother to apply for visas. Some people don't do it as a matter of principle. One of them is Moscow traveller Valery Shanin, who has made visa-free travel a meaning of his life. "I have made several round-the-world travels as a part of my World Without Visas program. I launched the online and offline training course where I teach young travellers how they can enter and leave any country unnoticed", he says.

Shanin insists he makes nothing illegal and simply uses the loopholes in the national migration laws. Besides, he adds, the most interesting places there are in the countries the Russian nationals aren't required visas anyway.

Image: Igor Zarembo, wikipedia cc