by Zohra Moosa

Cross-posted at openDemocracy People On the Move blog.

Source: Chris Stewart/AP

Earlier this month I had the good fortune to be able to travel to New York from where I am usually based in London, UK. While the trip itself was great, the to and the from were quite stressful.

I have been fairly lucky travel wise. I have two passports, both from countries that are generally welcomed around the world. I do of course get hassle from border guards sometimes because of my race (I’m South Asian). But my English, and the accent I speak it in, generally mean I can talk my way through basic questioning with some confidence, though not always ease. Some countries are trickier for me than others obviously: when I travelled to Morocco, immigration control insisted I write where my father was born on my paperwork when I was coming in and then again when I was going out of the country. They weren’t at all interested in where my mother was born. As it happens, my father was born in Pakistan. This is not a country that is ‘generally welcomed around the world.’ Certainly not in most of Europe and North America, where I spend the bulk of my travel time. It is also  on the current  ‘watch out for them’ list of many countries.

Despite my ownership of these powerful passports, travelling to the US this time around was not comfortable at all. I haven’t been for a couple of years, though I have been since 11 September. I should have paid more attention to the recent visa changes therefore, but I was busy with work right up to the day of my travel and so didn’t. I relied on the two passports I have and assumed that between them, I would be ok. It’s not like I personally was born in Pakistan…

How stressful then to discover, on the day of my flight, that as a British citizen, I should have applied for a visa waiver at least 72 hours before travelling.

What to do? I was already at the airport. I didn’t really have any excuse for not having applied. My air ticket clearly stated I needed to take responsibility for the new visa regulations. The visa itself was free. And I only needed to have submitted a form online, which is how I bought my ticket anyway. So no real financial or mechanical or language or other barrier to my applying. I just didn’t do it.

If I’m honest, I secretly thought that I shouldn’t have to. Why? Because my other citizenship is Canadian. I believed, to my core, that ‘things’ couldn’t have gotten so bad that Canadians now needed visas to go to the US. We might have people being deported or detained who should be granted asylum; we might have Guantanamo and the locking up of people who have committed no crime; we might have the introduction of second class citizenship where not everyone in the country has access to the same human rights; we might even have trafficking and a slave trade and all other manner of horrible injustices that laugh in the face of borders and border controls. But I was steadfastly refusing to believe that Canadians would have to ’suffer’ the fate of other foreigners, and be asked to apply for a visa to enter America.

This is the age we, that is to say people like me, live in. Where we allow, collectively, quite awful things to happen to people who are not ‘us’ in the name of security and safety. Where we raise questions and objections about the nature of borders when we ourselves have to deal with them, but not necessarily when we are imposing them on others. Where we enjoy and feel entitled to enjoy all the good there is to gain from border crossings – of people, ideas, information and goods – but ignore the costs to people in less secure positions of this movement.

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ZOHRA MOOSA is a Women’s Rights advisor at ActionAid.