Passport

• 1. Introduction

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  Passport: a small booklet that stands between a person and the rest of the world. From the Hebrew Bible to a 1920 conference in Paris, this document has shaped who gets to cross a border, who gets turned back, and why those decisions are made at all. The word itself may descend from a medieval Italian phrase meaning to pass the harbor, or perhaps to pass the gates of a walled city. That ambiguity is fitting. The passport has always been a document of competing claims: about identity, about belonging, and about whose authority counts when you arrive at a foreign shore. It certifies who you are without granting you any rights. It is issued by your government but addressed to foreign officials. It can be revoked at any moment without a court's approval. How did a booklet of biographical information become the world's most consequential document of permission? And what happens when the document you carry does not quite say what you need it to say?

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  Nehemiah 2:7-9, dating from approximately 450 BC, records one of the earliest known references to paperwork serving the role a passport plays today. Nehemiah, an official under King Artaxerxes I of Persia, asked permission to travel to Judea. The king granted leave and supplied a letter to the governors beyond the river, requesting safe passage through their lands. This was not a document Nehemiah carried as a citizen of a state; it was a royal favor granted to a specific official for a specific journey.

  The ancient Indian political text Arthashastra, from the third century BCE, took a more systematic approach. It describes passes issued at the rate of one masha per pass to enter and exit the country, along with the duties of officers required to issue sealed passes before a person could leave or enter the countryside.

  Passports were embedded in the Chinese bureaucracy as early as the Western Han period, which ran from 202 BC to 9 AD, possibly earlier in the Qin dynasty. These documents required the holder's age, height, and bodily features. Even children needed them, though those of one year or less in their mother's care may have been exempt.

  In the medieval Islamic Caliphate, the mechanism was financial rather than biographical. The bara'a was a receipt for taxes paid. Muslims who paid zakah and dhimmis who paid jizya received the receipt; the receipt functioned as a basic passport permitting travel between regions. Movement was therefore linked directly to fiscal compliance. In the 12th century the Republic of Genoa issued a document called the Bulletta to its nationals traveling to the ports of Genoese colonies overseas, and to foreigners entering them.

• 3. The English Model

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  King Henry V of England is credited with inventing what some consider the first British passport in the modern sense. The earliest reference to these documents appears in a 1414 Act of Parliament. Their purpose was to help English subjects prove who they were when traveling in foreign lands, a reversal of the earlier Italian model, which issued documents to foreign travelers rather than to local citizens.

  By 1540, granting travel documents in England had become a function of the Privy Council. It was around this time that the term "passport" entered the English record. In 1794, responsibility shifted again, this time to the Office of the Secretary of State.

  The Holy Roman Empire took a different approach. The 1548 Imperial Diet of Augsburg required the general public to hold imperial documents for travel, on pain of permanent exile. The stakes for non-compliance were not administrative; they were existential.

  In 1791, the document's limitations became vivid in a different way. Louis XVI attempted to flee France during the Flight to Varennes, disguising himself as a valet. Passports for the nobility at the time typically listed a number of persons by their function without further physical description, which made the masquerade conceivable, though ultimately unsuccessful.

  By October 1850, a Pass-Card Treaty among German states was standardizing the information a travel document had to include: issuing state, name, status, residence, and a physical description of the bearer. The treaty also specified that tramping journeymen and jobseekers were not to receive pass-cards, a detail that reveals how clearly the document was already being used as a tool of social sorting.

• 4. Wartime Standardization

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  Before World War I, passports had largely fallen out of use across Europe. A rapid expansion of railway infrastructure beginning in the mid-nineteenth century had made passport enforcement impractical: trains crossed multiple borders faster than inspectors could process the number of passengers involved. For roughly thirty years before the war, passports were not required for most travel within Europe, and crossing a border was a relatively straightforward procedure.

  The war ended that openness. European governments reintroduced border passport requirements for security reasons and to prevent the emigration of people with skills deemed useful to the war effort. Those controls remained in place after the war.

  British tourists of the 1920s complained sharply about the new requirements, particularly about the attached photographs and physical descriptions, which they felt led to what they called a "nasty dehumanisation". The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act of 1914 had already defined citizenship more precisely and created a booklet form of the passport, making photographs mandatory.

  In 1920, the League of Nations held the Paris Conference on Passports and Customs Formalities and Through Tickets. The conference produced passport guidelines and a general booklet design. Follow-up conferences in 1926 and 1927 refined those guidelines further. From 1922 to 1938, the League of Nations also issued Nansen passports to stateless refugees, a humanitarian document for people whom no state had chosen to certify.

  Passport standardization under the International Civil Aviation Organization came in 1980. ICAO standards defined the machine-readable passport, a document where key biographical information is printed in alphanumeric strings suitable for optical character recognition, allowing border controllers to process holders without manually entering data into a computer. The technical standard for these documents is published as ICAO Doc 9303 Machine Readable Travel Documents.

• 5. The Biometric Turn

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  Since 1998, many countries have shifted to biometric passports that contain an embedded microchip to authenticate identity and guard against counterfeiting. As of July 2024, over 150 jurisdictions issue these e-passports; non-biometric passports previously issued typically remain valid until their expiration date.

  China's transition illustrates the scale of the change. On the 1st of July 2011, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched a trial issuance of e-passports to individuals traveling overseas on government affairs. The chip stores the face, fingerprints, and other biometric features of the holder, along with name, sex, personal photo, passport validity, and a digital certificate. Ordinary biometric passports followed from the Ministry of Public Security on the 15th of May 2012. By January 2015, all new passports issued in China were biometric; non-biometric passports were no longer produced.

  In 2012, over 38 million Chinese citizens held ordinary passports, comprising only 2.86 percent of the total population at that time. By 2014, China issued 16 million passports in that year alone, surpassing the United States at 14 million and India at 10 million to rank first in the world. The number of ordinary passports in circulation reached 120 million by October 2016, approximately 8.7 percent of the population. As of April 2017, China had issued over 100 million biometric ordinary passports.

  The RFID chip at the center of the biometric passport mirrors the technology used in smartcards. The passport booklet is designed around a contactless embedded chip that holds digital signature data, intended to confirm both the integrity of the document and the accuracy of the biometric data stored on it.

• 6. Passports Without Full Citizenship

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  Eligibility for a passport does not always map cleanly onto citizenship. American Samoa and Swains Island are defined in U.S. law as outlying possessions; persons born there, or descended from someone born there, acquire U.S. nationality but not U.S. citizenship. Their passports carry an endorsement on the annotations page reading: "THE BEARER IS A UNITED STATES NATIONAL AND NOT A UNITED STATES CITIZEN." These non-citizen nationals may live and work in the United States without restriction, but no U.S. state currently permits them to vote in federal or state elections.

  The United Kingdom maintains several distinct passport categories that do not grant the right of abode in the UK itself. British National (Overseas) passports were created for individuals connected to Hong Kong prior to the territory's transfer to China. Until the 31st of January 2021, BN(O) holders could use those passports for immigration clearance in Hong Kong and for consular protection from overseas Chinese diplomatic missions. After that date, the Chinese and Hong Kong governments prohibited BN(O) passports as travel or identity documents. BN(O) holders without any other nationality must use a Document of Identity for Visa Purposes to travel. This restriction affects most severely those of Indian, Pakistani, and Nepali ethnicity, who were not granted Chinese nationality in 1997.

  In Latvia and Estonia, non-citizens are individuals, primarily of Russian or Ukrainian ethnicity, who settled during the Soviet occupation. They are not citizens of Latvia or Estonia but hold a special non-citizen passport issued by each government. Approximately two thirds are ethnic Russians. The UN Special Rapporteur has noted that the citizenship and naturalization laws in Latvia are seen by the Russian community as discriminatory. Per Russian visa policy, holders of the Estonian alien's passport or the Latvian non-citizen passport are entitled to visa-free entry to Russia, whereas Estonian and Latvian citizens must obtain an electronic visa.

  About 60,000 individuals currently hold Taiwanese passports as Nationals Without Household Registration, a category that exempts them from conscription but subjects them to immigration controls when crossing ROC borders and excludes them from voting in Taiwanese elections.

• 7. Fraud and Its Consequences

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  By 1977, the U.S. State Department was recording approximately 900 cases of passport fraud annually. In 1940, American Communist Party members Earl Browder and Welwel Warszower were convicted for the unlawful use of passports. These early cases established a pattern: passport fraud rarely exists for its own sake. It is typically committed to make another act possible.

  Convictions for passport fraud in the United States can result in fines up to $250,000 and prison sentences of between 10 and 20 years. The Diplomatic Security Service, the State Department's law enforcement arm, works with law enforcement agencies in over 160 countries to investigate cases.

  The incidents in the public record are varied. In 1965, Ronnie Biggs, the "Great Train Robber", entered Australia on a fake passport after escaping from prison. His wife and children used fake passports to follow him the following year. In October 2000, Alexander Litvinenko fled from Ukraine to Turkey on a forged passport under the alias Chris Reid, his actual passport having been impounded by Russian authorities after criminal charges were filed against him. In May 2001, Kim Jong-nam, son of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, was arrested at Narita International Airport in Tokyo, traveling on a fake Dominican Republic passport. He was deported to the People's Republic of China, and the incident caused Kim Jong-il to cancel a planned visit to China.

  A distinct category is the camouflage passport: a document designed to look like a passport from a non-existent entity, such as the "Republic of Mainau" or a "Baltic Trade Mission" diplomatic document. These are otherwise legal to create but may be used in fraudulent circumstances. The World Passport, issued by a non-official organization, falls into a related category: fantasy documents that make a political statement or serve as a novelty, and are not accepted for entry into most countries.

• 8. Passport Value and Mobility

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  As of 2026, the strongest passport in the world by mobility score is the Singaporean passport. Mobility score counts the number of countries that allow the holder to enter for general tourism visa-free, via visa on arrival, via electronic travel authorization, or via an eVisa issued within three days.

  A different measurement, based on countries where holders may live and work rather than merely visit, produces a different ranking. By that measure the Irish passport ranks highest, because it allows holders to live in all European Union and European Economic Area countries, plus Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The Irish passport is currently the only European Union passport that still carries this right to live and work in the United Kingdom.

  As of the 21st of September 2022, Danish citizens held visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 188 countries and territories, ranking the Danish passport fifth in the world, tied with the passports of Austria, the Netherlands, and Sweden, according to the Henley Passport Index. A World Tourism Organization report from 2016 ranked the Danish passport first in the world for travel freedom under a mobility index of 160, tied with Finland, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.

  For the Serbian passport, the trajectory tells a different story. As of August 2023, Serbian citizens had visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 138 countries and territories, ranking it 38th overall. The Serbian passport is among the five passports with the most improved ratings globally since 2006, measured by the growth in countries its holders may visit without a visa.