Can we please do away with the pettiness of travellers’ visas?

Punishing citizens of one country but not another makes governments look spiteful

The Chinese border guard who recently escorted me out of Shanghai airport’s international arrivals terminal after 17 hours in transit was so unimpeachably polite about the whole thing — apologetic, even, full of assurances that no, no, no, it certainly wasn’t my fault, and yes, yes, yes, it was all terribly unfair and quite right, how is anyone to know about entry requirements not stipulated until they are in fact required — that I would hate to sound ungrateful for what amounted to, all in all, a very pleasant banishment experience, courtesy of the most populous country in the world.

But there’s no disguising the fact that it was about revenge. This is the purpose of any number of foreign visas, and the animating spirit behind the denials of entry and deportations that inevitably follow: spite. Part petty cash-grab, part punishmentby-paperwork, the entry visa is the bureaucrat’s fever dream of retribution against nations.

I admittedly hold this belief out of my own sense of spite. Still (or perhaps therefore), I’d like to submit the following argument: Kill the visa. Kill it dead.

Visas can be found and picked off easily enough. Countries are generally not shy about advertising their ill will by charging $50 or so for the pleasure of crossing a border or by declaring that no price is high enough to suffer a traveller’s company.

Whether or not their revenge is served cold, it is usually served publicly, all to better make the passive-aggressive anger of the server known. Not so in my case: China evidently felt bashful about its various diplomatic disputes with Turkey over ethnic minorities and other matters, such that its own immigration website fell conspicuously silent on the point that even non-Turkish citizens brandishing enough Turkish stamps on their passports won’t receive the transit visa otherwise granted on arrival.

But it’s normally easy to discover who doesn’t much like one’s country.

Luckily, they’re often places one doesn’t wish to go. France, Italy, Mexico — these are among Canadians’ favourite tourism destinations, and none requires a visa. Eritrea, North Korea, Russia and the typical Stan, on the other hand, seem to feel they must dedicate entire departments to the work of actively dissuading hordes of Canadian travellers from flooding their territories.

As ever, spite is self-defeating. Travellers may decide that the country isn’t worth the entry fee. Iran’s visa has always seemed particularly absurd: for a Canadian, it can be about $300 for a three-day visa. The country is culturally and geographically stunning, but considering that the traveller may be forced into the supervision of a chaperon, presumably to make sure that he doesn’t commit journalism, much less secret away several American foreign service workers who have the misfortune of getting swept up in a 1970s-style coup, the price is steep.

But of course the world should not feel too sorry for us. Canada being rather good at passiveaggressive digs, and not wishing to deny any more make-work projects to the public service than strictly necessary, we happily return the favour. We make people from the majority of the countries in the world apply for a visa. Americans, Brits, and Swedes don’t require one, of course, but if we don’t want the national of one state or another to feel too comfortable, we need only have him stand in a different line.

Perhaps the requirement and exemption of visas can be an effective bargaining chip for diplomats negotiating other priorities. But by openly preferring some guests over others on the basis of their nationality, the host country can’t help but look petty. Moreover, it looks foolish if it believes that its guests won’t notice that they’re being punished for some dispute over which they have no control, and that they won’t feel some spite of their own.

As the border guard said before wishing me safe travels back to Canada, “It’s all political.”