Paper Borders
Amidst our second year of living with COVID-19, international travel has begun to open up again. Vaccinations, masking in airports, and social distancing precautions are meant to minimize the risks of international travel.
A surge of American citizens eager to get away are preparing themselves for a trip by packing, making arrangements for their pets to be cared for, and making sure they have their documents in order… but there just might be one major flaw in that process.
Passports.
“…some walls are so thick, and borders so closed, that even dreams and ideas can’t travel” (0:20) Karoli Hindriks claims in her TED Talk “Why the Passport Needs an Upgrade”. In the ten minute video Hindriks proposes the advantages of a globalized, digital passport; namely, that travel would be made easier, and more importantly, the immigration process would become a universal procedure creating “Frictionless, borderless mobility for all” (1:13). In a post-9/11 world, just getting through the security lines is time consuming and anxiety inducing, let alone making it through customs and the immigration process.
With a globalized, digital passport, travelers and immigrants would upload important documents like birth and marriage certificates and other documents required for travel just once, the information readily available and pre-authorized for any form of movement across borders.
Just yesterday, September 30th, 2021, San Francisoco’s Golden Gate Bridge was stalled for half an hour by protestors demanding an easier pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, organized by the Bay Area Coalition for Economic Justice and Citizenship for All. The organization issued a statement to newsrooms via email which detailed the merits of documenting immigrants, including an increase in GP:
“…a pathway to citizenship for all 11 million undocumented immigrants would increase U.S. gross domestic product by a cumulative total of $1.7 trillion over 10 years, create 438,800 new jobs, and increase wages for undocumented and American workers… “
Hindriks’ home country of Estonia appears to confirmation their sentiment easing immigration could boost the economy when she says :
“…digital signature[s] alone…” (rather than the standard process of submitting paper documents in the immigration/travel process) “…enables Estonia to save 2% of GDP every year… 2% of GDP globally [emphasis added] would be 1.7 trillion dollars… with that amount of money we could solve world hunger not once, but 56 times every year” (6:16).
Will we accept the movement toward globalization of resources? Will we adopt the humanitarian process of opening borders to all immigrants? Will we choose to make choices that will save extraordinary amounts of money that might be reallocated to greater priorities like stopping climate change, ending world hunger, or pandemic preparedness? We all have the same basic needs: food, clean water, shelter, and safety. If one country has those resources while the citizens of another country don’t is it right to give every person the option to access it? Hindriks thinks so.
“Your passport describes you as a resident of your country. We say you’re a citizen of the world.” (9:17)
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