A great trend reversal is taking place. The latest evidence is that of the 27-year wife of a Briton and mother of two being jailed and facing deportation to her native Singapore after having cared for her dying parents, as well as that of a well-known Australian author being detained for nearly two hours and treated as a suspect upon entry to the U.S.
For nearly a generation, doors and markets alike were increasingly open to citizens of Western countries. But governments are now not only slamming the doors shut to tourists and immigrants, but are in increasingly casual fashion even using the mobility of their own citizens as political bargaining chips.
Multiple citizenship, once maligned as a sign of divided loyalty and targeted for elimination in a 1963 treaty, was instead gradually legalized in most countries, including the U.S. in 1992. A second or third passport even became sought-after by those with significant financial wealth seeking to diversify holdings and create tax-efficient investment plans.
Visa-free travel expanded broadly; a German passport now entitles the holder to enter a whopping 177 countries without filling out invasive, self-contradictory forms and paying onerous fees to various middlemen for the privilege of merely asking permission to cross a border.
Tourism revenue tripled since the fall of the Iron Curtain and dozens of countries flung open their borders, hungry for middle-class visitors and the increasing discretionary income they brought with them.
But not since the World War I-era nativist progressive Republican panic over Italians, Irish and German immigrants resulted in renamed foods, language bans, and the 1924 quota act imposing immigration quotas; not since Mexicans were deported en masse during the Great Depression; not since wartime panic over Italian, Japanese and German immigrants led to the institution of registration requirements in 1939 that threatened all immigrants with deportation; not since thousands of Japanese-Americans were indefinitely imprisoned without trial in 1942; and not since a 1978 law made passports mandatory for travel in peacetime has the U.S. government made such a stark reversal in its attitude towards travel and trade as since the year 2001 and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
And other Western countries are following the U.S. example and making sharp course corrections of their own in the direction of increasing state surveillance, control, and discretion over the movement of the middle class. Both Canada and the UK have enacted schemes in which passports can be canceled unilaterally without a court hearing, and the EU is using the threat of ending visa-free travel as a bargaining chip with the US government.
Given that the risk of being killed by a law enforcement officer is nearly an order of magnitude greater than that of succumbing to a terrorist attack, it is time to rethink the policy of placing guns and arbitrary authority in between people and the places they want to go.
