The world is often characterised as porous and easy to manoeuvre in this age of unparalleled technology and a globalised economy. But it's only ever been this way to people who have a combination of a particular passport and cultural heritage, particularly in settler colonial nations such as Australia.
In the 2017 annual Henley & Partners Visa Restrictions Index, Australia was ranked as having the seventh best passport in the world for travellers according to the number of countries its citizens can access visa-free. Germany topped the index, followed by Sweden and then Denmark, Finland, Italy, Spain and the United States, who each came in at a collective third. The most restrictive passports, wherein their owners had the least freedom to travel, were Pakistani, Iraqi and Afghani ones.
Although the Australian passport is an advantageous one to have on the world stage, it is a highly political, exclusionary document in itself. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are regularly denied full citizenship on account of them not having access to birth certificates, which in turn prevents them from being able to apply for an Australian passport, while many reject Australian nationality and citizenship as an act of resistance and choose to use an Aboriginal passport instead.
Passport privilege is tangible, but merely having the passport of a Western first-world country doesn't grant you the right to embark on footloose travel and living adventures in every other country — an oft overlooked reality that was underlined by mechanical engineer and writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied, an Australian of Sudanese background, in an interview with Buzzfeed Australia.
'The being-born-in-Sudan thing and having it in your passport makes a difference ... People talk about [the world] being globalised and borderless — it's only globalised and borderless if you have the right passport.'
Perhaps at no time was this more apparent than during Donald Trump's 90-day visa ban on six majority-Muslim countries including Sudan, which meant Abdel-Magied wasn't able to go on a planned speaking tour in the US due to her dual citizenship.
Any mention of dual citizenship is likely to elicit a derisive eye-roll in light of the bureaucratic crisis that forced many MPs to resign from Australian Parliament due to their previously unstated dual citizenship status. But this dichotomy holds concrete ramifications for people of colour beyond their ability to serve in parliament. Acutely aware of any dual citizenship status they may have, unlike the many white MPs who were forced to resign, people of colour with a multi-ethnic, biracial or transnational heritage are engaged in a constant juggling act.
Travel aside, the ability to uproot oneself and find a permanent home in another corner of the world is far harder for a person of colour on an Australian passport than it is for a white person on the same passport.
"The delineation between those with and without European ancestry creates a cohort of second-class citizens who can't enjoy the same privileges because the old bloodlines of colonialism continue to be reproduced."
For instance, Australians who have at least one Irish-born parent or grandparent who was an Irish citizen at the time of their birth can claim citizenship in Ireland. Australians descended from a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent born in Italy may have a claim to Italian citizenship. These arrangements are replicated in many other European countries such as Greece, Germany, Hungary and Spain. In all these countries, citizenship is passed through bloodline — according to the principle of jus sanguinis — not place of birth, which is the principle of jus soli.
This effectively locks out more recent immigrants who may have been born in these European countries but do not descend from the requisite blood line, and runs in sharp contrast to countries such as the United States who grant citizenship to anyone born on American soil.
This cycle of inherited citizenship is reproduced through generation after generation of European family trees. In the 2013 collection Geographies of Privilege, academic Max Andruki wrote an essay about 'transnational whiteness' in the specific context of South Africans migrating to the UK, and situated it within a broader historical narrative of ancestral and settler coloniser privilege — many parallels of which can be drawn with Australia, a fellow settler nation.
'The possession of British nationality through descent thus enables whites who have it to freely move between the UK and South Africa,' he writes, 'fuelling a transnational culture of mobility, in which the body's occupation of any given space can always be contingent, temporary and voluntary.'
Australians with European ancestry do not have imminent deadlines hanging over them in the same way as other Australians who need to apply for youth mobility or working holiday visas before they're 30. Their heritage grants them a painless route to European passports, which means they're able to live and work in any country that is part of the European Union.
It is not uncommon either to hear of white Australians casually talking about the UK Ancestry Visa that they're able to access, which is a visa issued by the UK to Commonwealth citizens with a grandparent born in the UK, Channel Islands or Isle of Man and acts as another avenue through which expanded opportunities are granted by virtue of heritage. It is mainly used by young Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and South Africans of British descent and grants them five years to live in the UK, after which they can apply for a limited or indefinite time, so long as they demonstrate that they have been living and working continuously in the UK and will continue to do so.
'By attending to ancestry, we can argue that through histories of the movement of certain kinds of bodies into certain national spaces, the presence of white bodies has been materially constituted in particular places,' writes Andruki.
The material advantages of being white are in addition to the more murky ways in which people of colour's mobility are often restricted, manifest in the increased scrutiny and heightened discriminatory security screening practices that became more commonplace after 9/11.
Conversely, white people don't face limited mobility in Asia and, according to a report by Alice Yan for the South China Morning Post earlier this year, are even coveted in countries such as China for certain roles on the basis of their appearance.
'It's not uncommon for Chinese companies to hire foreigners, especially white Westerners, to represent them in public relations-type roles,' writes Yan. 'The business of "renting" a foreigner has been going on for well over a decade, and even as foreign faces become more commonplace — there were more than 900,000 foreigners working in China in 2016, up from just 10,000 in the 1980s, according to official data — it remains popular.'
The delineation between those with and without European ancestry creates a cohort of second-class citizens who can't enjoy all the same privileges because the old bloodlines of settler colonialism continue to be reproduced in ever present ways — manifest in limited cross-border mobility in this case.
The benefits of increased mobility are manifold, from gaining access to a wide range of economic and recreational opportunities to building families, friendships and communities, yet it simply isn't something that is available to each and every Australian.
Sonia Nair is a freelance writer and critic who has been published in The Big Issue, the Australian Book Review and Books&Publishing. She tweets @son_nair and blogs about how she never follows her food intolerances at www.whateverfloatsyourbloat.com.