In a pageant that insists on rewarding beauty regardless of borders, borders proved to, in fact, be quite a decisive factor at the 74th edition of Miss Universe. In this year’s iteration of the annual competition, the organization’s president, Raul Rocha, explained that Miss Côte d’Ivoire Olivia Yacé could’ve vied for the first-position’s crown if only her passport hadn’t, in his words, rendered her practically “immobilized” by visa restrictions.
As is tradition, reigning title holders are expected to spend the year travelling as the organization’s ambassador; a duty Yacé was deemed unfit for, not because of talent but because of the country her passport comes from. Ranked 80th amongst global passports, citizens of Ivory Coast need a visa to access 175 countries, suggesting that if Yacé had won, she would’ve, according to Rocha, “spent a whole year in an apartment because of the cost of visa processes, of lawyers”’ per an interview given after the closing ceremony. For a woman of color whose only disqualifying trait, in this case, was the geographical location of her birthplace, the message couldn’t have been more clear, or bleak: in a world obsessed with merit, it is still your passport that decides how far you’re allowed to go or even dream. And this case study is anything but an anomaly.
View this post on Instagram
In popular Moroccan culture, as it is the case across most of the Middle East and North Africa, passports inspire a strain of humour that borders on fatalism. A crimson passport— the shade favored by most European states— is usually equated with freedom itself, a portable assurance that the world will, more often than not, open its doors without protest. Its green counterpart— common in many Arab and African states— is cast as an encumbrance; a document burdened by restriction rather than possibility. This rationale, though reductionist, happens to hold some water as it rests on the presumption that certain passports possess more power than others.
Power, in this context, is measured by the number of automatic or semi-automatic stamps your passport grants you. The more it provides, the stronger it is considered; the fewer it confers, the less welcome you are around the world. And if you read between the lines, you’ll start noticing a trend: “powerful” passports are, almost without exception, Western, while the weakest will almost always originate from the global South.
Of course, it is never articulated in such inelegant terms as the explanation is more times than not sugar-coated, hidden behind the language of geo-politics and precaution. The logic, according to many, is that citizens from nations deemed poor, underdeveloped, or in crisis present a higher statistical risk of overstaying; therefore making mobility — a human right safeguarded by the United Nations — a matter of perceived liability rather than actual circumstance. The result? Entire parts of the planet being barred from the international travel circuit, while being considered active threats to it.
All it takes to see the dynamic at work is to look around your own circle and note the passports your friends hold, the borders they’ve crossed, and ask how many places they’ve managed to reach without any issue. Not that many right? While some people do indeed overstay or migrate illegally, this narrative frames this issue as one that is almost exclusive to the global South as though people from the global North don’t bend the rules themselves, stretching tourist visas to their limits or leaving and re-entering a country within twenty-four hours to reset their stay. Their manoeuvres are treated as harmless technicalities. Ours? Grounds for prosecution and punishment.
The impact of this imbalance is neither neutral nor negligible. Families are unable to visit one another; students lose out on education abroad; workers miss out on opportunities that could change their lives. And as a result, many end up feeling cut off from the wider world and are expected to simply take the L. And when they do attempt to apply for a visa, their files are often dismissed without anyone properly paying attention to them. The requirements— expensive, invasive, and quite frankly almost impossible to meet to the average person— would halt international travel entirely if applied across the board. In the meantime, they only serve to waste time and money at best, or crush dreams at worst.
“Just to get a visa to Paris, Milan— wherever —and compete with people born here, without that struggle, is already a huge hurdle,” Moroccan model Youssef Faraj told MILLE. “Agencies or brands don’t necessarily have the patience. They might help and sponsor your visa the first, second, and maybe third time, then they decide it’s not worth it. Add to that the fact that visa appointments in Morocco aren’t always available as you need two months to book one when the agency needs you next week and all of a sudden you end up paying a middleman, putting yourself into debt with money you barely have,” he continued, stressing on how exhausting it is to experience all of this on a mental level.
View this post on Instagram
“Knowing you could have made it, but won’t because of technicalities can break you. The situation is unfair. We have incredible talent, across every field, but in Morocco, as it is in a lot of places, they’re impossible to pursue, and elsewhere, impossible to access. Agencies want North African faces, but financially and logistically, I understand why they choose those born here: they’re flexible. We’re stuck.”
To make matters worse, a whole economy has developed around the process: large sums of money collected for applications that offer no certainty in return. In 2023, Algerians spent over €13 million for 166,200 rejected applications for access to the Schengen area. Out of 474,032 submissions, 35% were refused, meaning that thousands paid what, for many, amounts to a week or more of wages simply to be told “no” with a nice stamp. For comparion, in Morocco that same year, an estimated 136,300 visa applications were denied, amounting to nearly €11 million in fees. Different country but same system built on refusal, irretrievable fees, and an apparatus that converts exclusion into revenue.
For those who live in this crushing reality, no reminder is necessary as their position within the world’s hierarchy of who can look outward and who can’t are reminded each time they open Google Flights. For the more privileged, however, episodes such as the recent Miss Universe debacle should — at least for the wokest of them — make something click, and question the system we all participate in, though on totally different sides.
In a few months from now, the United States, along with Canada and Mexico, will be hosting the next edition of the FIFA World Cup. And though many are excited, some fans are already dealing with a sobering truth: supporting your national team does not guarantee you the right to see them play. Haitians and Iranians — both nations that have officially secured their place in the forthcoming edition of the quadrennial tournament and both featuring on the U.S. travel-ban roster — will, in principle, see their players, as well as their core delegation be exempted under special provisions. Their supporters, however, along with journalists, scouts, analysts, amongst others, will face an automatic denial of entry, leaving them to experience football’s most important affair from afar, resorting to following their sporting ambassadors from home, unlike the rest inside stadiums. This is just the tip of a much larger iceberg, the unseen mass made up of ordinary people who will never be granted a platform to speak for themselves.
So where does that leave us? Nowhere really. By the looks of it, the dream of a borderless world, once sold as the future of mankind, turns out to be a reality only enjoyed by a small and already privileged slice of the globe. For everyone else, the world remains something to negotiate, its borders opening or closing at the mercy of unfair policies and systemic prejudice. And maybe that’s the truth everyone’s turning a blind eye to: the desire to move has never been more universal than now, but the permission to roam in it, never more uneven.
