A Broken Passport Still Works

On borders, certainty, and the stories travel tells about itself

The modern infrastructure of travel in the Global North is built around the expectation of frictionless motion. We have engineered our air borders to behave like automatic doors at a supermarket. You approach, you present a passport with a microchip, and the glass slides open. We do not experience borders as barriers, but instead as brief, administrative pauses in our otherwise uninterrupted forward momentum.

This is why, when the friction returns, it feels less like a delay and more like an insult.

My passport is currently broken. From what I gather, it is a physical failure of the electronics in the cover, likely from being stuffed in a variety of bags and pockets. The booklet itself is valid. There is no visible damage. The photo is clear, and the expiration date is years away. It is a dumb object in a smart world.

For the last month, as I wait for a gap in my schedule long enough to surrender the document for replacement and meanwhile waffle at the replacement cost, I have been exiled from the eGates. I can no longer walk the hypnotic, silent path of the automated scanner. Instead, I am forced to “Seek Assistance”.

By the time I reach this queue, I already recognize the people around me. I first stood with them at check-in. My passport wouldn’t scan at the kiosk for my boarding pass, so I was sent to a staffed counter. That’s where their folders and lives were out in full view.

Global mobility is not a mystery. It is ranked, indexed, and published every year. Some passports allow visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to most of the world. Others require advance applications, in-person interviews, financial disclosures, and proof of intent to return home. The difference is not subtle. It is measured in weeks of paperwork, hundreds of dollars in fees, and hours spent assembling evidence that you do not intend to disappear.

That evidence is visible in the line itself. Indian families holding folders of paper thick enough to be novels. Chinese flipping through hotel confirmations and return tickets. An African businessman pulling a sample product out of his backpack in case pieces of paper are not enough to confirm he’s just attending a trade show. These travelers are not preparing for a trip; they are preparing to answer questions I’ve never been asked in my life.

For many travelers, that preparation never ends. Borders don’t appear as isolated events but as a permanent condition, something to plan around, and absorb the cost of long before a ticket is ever bought.

I was reminded of this long before my passport went analog. A few years ago, my wife and I planned a trip to South Africa with friends. We bought a discounted fare, cheap enough not to hesitate. We were visa-free. They weren’t. Despite holding EU passports, they needed an online eVisa. The website for them failed repeatedly. Emails took weeks to get answers, and phone calls led nowhere. There was talk of mailing passports to an embassy, and the unease of them doing so, given their previous efforts.

I was unconcerned. It was still months before the trip. I told them it would be sorted. That I would make calls, and if by nothing of my sheer force of will, it would work out. They were already done. After the initial effort, they pulled out of the trip. The flights went unused, the money lost. The border had already done its work. For us, the journey was real. For them, it never existed.

This is passportism. Not just the unequal distribution of access, but the unequal distribution of exposure. Some people are forced to reckon with borders constantly, while others are allowed to forget they exist.

That difference shapes understanding. Those who move most easily are rarely required to think about what movement costs. Automation doesn’t just separate travelers into fast and slow lanes. Instead, it separates those who are expected to account for borders from those who are not. Standing in those lines, it became obvious how little space this part of travel ever occupies in the stories we tell about it.

Most contemporary travel writing is produced by people like me, people for whom borders are usually a formality rather than a condition. From that position, borders become forgettable. They sit outside the narrative, something to be cleared so the trip can begin, or only brought up if it is a story itself.

For now, I am still in that line. I talk to the people around me. I watch what they carry and what they prepare to explain. I am reminded that for many travelers, this is not an interruption but the substance of a journey that had already started long before. The border is not something they pass through once, but hundreds of times in their head before they ever approach the kiosk.

At some point, I will replace this booklet and return to the land of green lights and silent glass barriers. It will not be, however, because I am better but because the system assumes I am. For now, I am close enough to see how much of travel begins only after permission is granted and how much work is done for journeys that never happen at all. 🛂

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