The Passport Index: Papers, Please!

How powerful is your passport? According to the Henley Passport Index, if you are Spanish or Italian you hold the third most powerful passport in the world. Yes, your burgundy-coloured EU passport is greater than a navy blue British passport (ranked 5th) or a US passport (ranked 9th.) But the small nation of Singapore holds the world’s most powerful passport, granting visa-free access to 195 out of 227 global destinations. 

Power to move

Passport indexes rank countries based on the travel freedom their passports offer. There is more than one index: check out passportindex.org, for example, which has an attractive interactive website and app! However, the Henley Passport Index is considered the most accurate; since 2005, this index, run by a British investment migration consultancy, has used data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Updated every month, it ranks 199 passports in total, factoring in visa-free access, visas on arrival and electronic travel authorisations (ETAs). 

Simple tools

Power rankings are revealing but they are also incomplete and can be misleading, as they are built on quantitive data, so small, remote territories such as Tristan da Cunha are given equal weight to big countries like France. According to Henley, their index is a handy reference tool as much for travellers as for government policy-makers. It illustrates the widening gap between top-ranking countries like Japan in 2nd place, and the least powerful, Afghanistan, whose citizens have access to only 27 destinations visa-free. 

Born (Un)free

The broader implications of these rankings draw on colonial history, immigration law, global trade and political trends like tariffs and isolationism — a tendency of today’s US. Countries with stable, developed economies have greater travel freedom because their citizens are considered low-risk. Racism plays a role in keeping countries in their place: Germans or Canadians are not seen as potential illegal immigrants, for example, but it is a different story for Somalians or Libyans. Such rules and even indexes themselves may be part of the problem with their hierarchical approach and definition of power in these terms. 

Heading to Helsinki

An alternative way to rank countries is by how much citizens are happy to stay at home. Through its annual Freedom in the World report, the US-based NGO Freedom House ranks 210 countries or territories by their citizens’ access to political rights and civil liberties. Each are given a status score and the higher the score, the more ‘free’ a country is. On this index, Henley leader Singapore has a score of 48 and is called only “partly free.” Spain and Italy have scores of 90, one point below the UK. All are called “free”. The US (also “free”) has a score of 83. And despite its history of colonisation from Russia on one side and Sweden on the other, Finland tops the report with a score of 100!