The Passport

I found my first passport the other day. Red leather cover, worn soft at the corners, a black and white photograph of a boy who does not yet know what the document in his hands actually is. I was barely nine. The first page carries a prohibition, printed in the flat bureaucratic language governments reserve for their most consequential restrictions: this passport cannot be used for travel to the following countries. USSR. Cuba. Communist China. East Germany. Poland. Czechoslovakia… A list of places a nine-year-old Honduran was, by law, forbidden from visiting.

Passports are a newer invention than most people assume. For much of the nineteenth century, migration across Europe was largely unhindered — a traveller decided when to leave and when to return, and no document asked permission on his behalf. The First World War changed that permanently, though not by design. Governments introduced passports as a wartime security measure, intended to be temporary. When the war ended, the League of Nations held conference after conference — Paris in 1920, Rome in 1924, Geneva in 1926 — each one recommending that passports be abolished as soon as possible, and each one concluding, somewhat sheepishly, that the time was not yet right. The temporary measure never actually ended. It simply kept being postponed until the Depression arrived, and with it, a political climate in which immigrants were no longer welcome by economies too fragile to share. After the Second World War, and with it the Cold War, passports became not just permanent but essential — a tool of control too useful, particularly for a United States gripped by its own Red Scare, to ever relinquish.

People kept moving anyway.

I remember, as a child, travelling with my parents to my family's hometown in the early 1980s and passing a sprawling complex of wooden barracks — a refugee camp that at its peak held tens of thousands of Nicaraguans fleeing civil war and the consolidation of communist rule. Some were poor and marginalised. Others had been comfortable, even prosperous, and had abandoned homes that would be seized by a government that no longer wanted them in it, all for the chance that their children might grow up free. Decades later I discovered that one of my wife's closest friends had been among them — her family's house confiscated, her parents forced to leave with whatever fit into a couple of suitcases.

I would get a taste of that same calculation myself, years later, under the threat of political prosecution for my work on the ZEDE framework. My wife and I packed a suitcase with documents and family mementos and kept it ready, in case we needed to leave in a hurry. The full story of that period is one I tell at greater length in my forthcoming book, The Fortress Builders. What I will say here is that the fear was not abstract, and the suitcase was not a metaphor.

The Nicaraguans who stayed in Honduras mostly rebuilt their lives from nothing, and rebuilt them well. Many became prosperous. Most became, in every meaningful sense, Honduran — raising families, building businesses, learning to love a country that was not the one they were born in. Some never went home, even after their own country returned, briefly, to democratic rule. Home, by then, was somewhere else.

My own children, now grown, have chosen to study abroad — not fleeing anything as dramatic as civil war, but old enough to have watched what their father's independent thinking cost him, and to want, for themselves, a place where ideas are not punished. I understand the choice completely. I am also, in my own way, still trying to build a country they might one day want to come back to.

As I write this, Ceuta is enduring one of the gravest border crises in its history. Tens of thousands have crossed from Morocco in a matter of days. Dozens have died in the attempt. I do not know, and would not presume to know, the individual motivations of any one person in that crowd. But I know they would not be risking their lives at a border fence if they believed their own country offered them and their children an equal chance at the life they are trying to reach.

It makes me wonder what the world would look like if the passport experiment had gone the other way — if the League of Nations conferences of the 1920s had succeeded, and people had simply been allowed to move where they wished, voting with their feet rather than their ballots. Would governments have been forced to compete for their own citizens through better governance, rather than simply preventing them from leaving? Would loyalty have had to be earned rather than assumed?

This is, in a smaller and more literal sense, the question the ZEDE framework tried to answer — not for the whole country, and not by abolishing borders, but by creating spaces within Honduras itself where people could choose to live under better governance without having to leave the nation they were born in. A place to vote with your feet without needing a passport at all.

The boy in that photograph did not know what those forbidden countries had in common, or what people were willing to endure to leave them anyway. He was just happy to be going on his first trip abroad with his mother. He did not know that his own children, given every choice available to them, would eventually choose to leave too — not fleeing tanks or borders, but simply choosing somewhere their father's ideas would not put them at risk. And he did not know that he would spend much of his working life trying to build, in miniature, a country good enough that leaving would stop being the obvious answer.

The list of forbidden nations is gone from Honduran passports now. The question underneath it remains. Some borders, it turns out, are not printed on documents — they are enforced by politics, and the most stubborn ones are the ones that exist inside a country's own imagination of what it is allowed to become.