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SPEAKER_02: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_01: What would we English say if we could not go from London to the Crystal Palace or from Manchester to Stockport without a passport or police officer at our heels? Those are the musings of an English publisher named John Gadsby travelling through Europe
SPEAKER_05: in the mid-19th century. This was before the modern passport system, wearily familiar to anyone who's ever passed border control. You stand in a queue, you proffer your standardised booklet to a uniformed official, perhaps she quizzes you about your journey while her computer checks your name against a terrorist watch list. For most of history, passports were neither so ubiquitous nor so routinely used. They were essentially a threat, a letter from some powerful person requesting anyone the traveller met to let them pass unmolested. Or else. The concept of passport as protection goes back to biblical times, and protection was a privilege, not a right. English gentlemen like Gadsby who wanted a passport before venturing across the channel once needed to unearth some personal social link to the relevant government minister. As Gadsby discovered, the more zealously bureaucratic of continental nations had realised the passport's potential as a tool of social and economic control. Even a century earlier, the citizens of France had to show paperwork not only to leave the country, but to travel from town to town. While wealthy countries today secure their borders to keep unskilled workers out, municipal authorities historically used them to stop their skilled workers from leaving. As the 19th century progressed, the railways and the steamboat made travel faster and cheaper. Passports were unpopular. France's emperor, Napoleon III, shared Gadsby's admiration for the more relaxed British approach. He described passports as, An oppressive invention, an embarrassment and an obstacle to the peaceable citizen. He abolished them in 1860. France wasn't alone. More and more countries either formally abandoned passport requirements or stopped bothering to enforce them, at least in peacetime. You could visit 1890s America without a passport, although it helped if you were white. In some South American countries, passport-free travel was in the constitution. In China and Japan, foreigners needed passports only to venture inland. By the turn of the 20th century, it seemed possible that passports might soon disappear altogether. What would today's world look like if they had? Early one morning in September 2015, Abdullah Kurdi, his wife and two sons, boarded a rubber dinghy on a beach in Bodren, Turkey. They hoped to make it four kilometres across the Aegean Sea to the Greek island of Kos. But the sea became rough and the dinghy capsized. Abdullah managed to cling to the boat, but his wife and children drowned. The body of his youngest child, three-year-old Alan, washed up on a Turkish beach, where it was photographed by a Turkish agency journalist. The image of the little boy became an icon of the migrant crisis that had convulsed Europe all that summer. The Kurdis hadn't planned to stay in Greece. They hoped, eventually, to start a new life in Vancouver, where Abdullah's sister, Tima, worked as a hairdresser. There are easier ways to travel from Turkey to Canada than starting with a dinghy to Kos, and Abdullah had the money. The €4,000 he paid a people smuggler could instead have bought plane tickets for them all. At least, it could have done, if they'd had the right passport. Since the Syrian government denied citizenship to ethnic Kurds, the Kurdis had no passports. But even with Syrian passports, they couldn't have boarded a plane to Canada. If they'd had passports issued by Sweden or Slovakia or Singapore or Samoa, they'd have had no problems. It can seem like a natural fact of life that the name of the country on our passport determines where we can travel and work – legally, at least. But it's a relatively recent historical development. And from a certain angle, it's odd. Many countries take pride in banning employers from discriminating among workers based on characteristics we can't change – whether we're male or female, young or old, gay or straight, black or white. It's not entirely true that we can't change our passport – if you've got $250,000, for example, you can buy one from St Kitts and Nevis. But, mostly, our passport depends on the identity of our parents and the location of our birth. And nobody chooses those. Despite this, there's no public clamour to judge people not by the colour of their passport, but by the content of their character. Less than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, migrant controls are back in fashion. President Trump calls for a wall along the US-Mexico border. The Schengen Zone in Europe cracks under the pressure of the migrant crisis. Europe's leaders scramble to distinguish refugees from economic migrants – the assumption being that someone who isn't fleeing persecution, someone who merely wants a better job, a better life, shouldn't be let in. Politically, the logic of restrictions on migration is increasingly hard to dispute. Yet economic logic points in the opposite direction. In theory, whenever you allow people to move to where the jobs are, output rises. In practice, all migration creates winners and losers, but research indicates that there are many more winners. In the wealthiest countries, by one estimate, five in six of the existing population are made better off by the arrival of immigrants. So why does this not translate into popular support for open borders? There are practical and cultural reasons why migration can be badly managed. Also, the losses tend to be more visible than the gains. Suppose a group of Mexicans arrives in America ready to pick fruit for lower wages than Americans are earning. The benefits – slightly cheaper fruit for everyone – are too widely spread and small to notice, while the costs – some Americans lose their jobs – produce vocal unhappiness. It should be possible to arrange taxes and public spending to compensate the losers, but it doesn't tend to work that way. The economic logic of migration often seems more compelling when it doesn't involve crossing national borders. How much might global economic output rise if anyone could get on their bikes to work anywhere? Some economists have calculated that it would double. That suggests our world would now be much richer if passports had died out in the early 20th century. There's one simple reason that they didn't. The First World War. With security concerns trumping ease of travel, governments imposed strict new controls on movement and they proved unwilling to relinquish their powers once peace returned. In 1920, the newly formed League of Nations called an international conference on passports, customs formalities and through tickets, and that effectively invented the passport as we know it. From 1921, the conference said, Passports should be 15.5cm by 10.5cm, 32 pages, bound in cardboard, with a photo. The format has changed remarkably little since. Like John Gadsby, anyone with the right colour passport can only count their blessings.
SPEAKER_05: Here's another podcast from the BBC World Service that you might like. It's a personal favourite of mine. More or less, Behind the Stats. This is your weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and you know, sometimes I even present it. Check it out.
SPEAKER_03: For more than a decade, Saatchi Art and their team of experts have helped art enthusiasts around the world discover one of a kind art they love. From abstracts and landscape paintings to sculptures and photographs.
