When security considerations violate individual rights

It is no secret that the information one has to divulge when applying for a visa, in many cases contravene basic ethical and constitutional standards. One has to furnish information that is not just current but also dig up details about a past life. In this regard, a prospective sojourner is denied the choice of what part of their history is relevant to the application and which history is best kept under wraps. Moreover, an applicant for a visa does not have the liberty to disown family, as each member of his or her immediate family has to be accounted for when making an application. Now imagine if you have lost touch with your brother who is an economic migrant or he has simply decided he wants nothing more to do with the family. Or consider if you are part of a polygamous union, on both the mother’s and father’s side, and have siblings from both sides…

Recently a friend of mine who is in her seventies applied for a visa. As I helped her fill the form, the absurdity of some of the requirements became clear maybe more so because we were dealing with someone from another era all together. Her siblings were also advanced in age and she was supposed to remember their birthdays and other personal details! Besides she has been a migrant herself for a long time such that some of the personal questions involving her relatives, including her parents who were both deceased and whom she had not lived with for a good number of years, proved difficult to answer.

Other than baring personal and family information one also has to publish one’s financial status. Indeed, it is not enough to establish whether you have money in a bank account or not but also to have records of your finances over a period of time. It goes without saying that if you are not liquid enough your chances of obtaining a visa are slim. Nor does one’s financial soundness guarantee being issued with a visa. Thus, in effect, all travelers are made very vulnerable to swindlers and scam artists who, could arm themselves with sensitive information about an applicant’s family and financial status and abuse such information for their own gains with or without the complicit of an embassy worker. Yet there is no reciprocal obligation by a foreign mission to insure that such information tendered will not be abused by its officials or agents.

Being issued with a visa is no guarantee that you will travel to your final destination at all or, if so, unperturbed. In various airports today, it is not enough that the immigration officials stamp your passports after satisfying themselves of its authenticity and that of the visas. In fact after one has gone through immigration there are other check points that a traveler has to clear though it is not clear what authority people who are not immigration officials and therefore part of the local law enforcement administration, have to deny a traveler a right to leave or enter a country even when they have the necessary documentation.

While I don’t deny that there are visa forgeries, it somehow seems incredulous to me that after undergoing a thorough screening at the respective embassy, and after careful evaluation with the airlines before checking in and lastly at immigration after checking in that one still is subjected to additional queries and searches even after embarking or immediately upon disembarking from a craft. In my estimation this practice which is normally done on people of colour such as Africans, Arabs and Asians especially from the global south seeks to break their spirit by reinforcing a feeling of unworthiness and contempt. It also seeks to perpetuate a tendency, among northern nations, to single out people from the global south as “problems” to be investigated or stopped in their tracks. Significantly it justifies continued discrimination on account of race, ethnic origin, nationality and language. Indeed what message does an onlooker get when only people of colour are stopped in airports just as they are disembarking from flights and they have not even reached an immigration point where their status can be determined?

What has shocked me of late is how such treatment is rampant even in the countries of origin themselves. Recently, I was traveling from South Africa to Brazil. I was struck that as we were boarding many black people from Angola were denied boarding even though some were on transit and had already been cleared. In fact the airlines officials would look at the colour of the passport and some colours were waved through (mostly red and blue) while others (mostly green) would be detained and inspected. Not all of the coloured folks boarding the flight were, however, Africans. I traveled with the Tanzanian National football coach who is Brazilian and was heading home. But to my amazement he and others like him upon landing in Brazil were also pulled aside on the assumption that they were migrants. This singling out of black people was done in a country that has the biggest African population outside of Africa and in fact the Afro descendants in Brazil exceed the overall population in some African countries.

I saw similar trends in South Africa, a nation freshly healing from the attacks on foreign workers. Whereas much a do was made by black South Africans about migrants from neigbouring countries, I witnessed many migrants from European countries who were working in department stores and hotels but who seemed unscathed from the violence meted out against African workers from other countries. It is hard not to miss the irony where we have been so conditioned by others to feel undeserving of opportunities for economic prosperity that we are more apt at weeding out one another while we leave those who look like our (colonial) masters untouched for they appear more deserving than our kind.

I should not be read as advocating blatant racism against folks who are not black or Africans as this will be condoning what I am condemning. Rather, I should be understood to advocate for people’s right to mobility on the basis of a set and ethical standard not a racist, discriminatory and dehumanizing standard. Also, I should be read to advocate for an end to the illegal and undue intrusion to an individual’s privacy and personal rights. Otherwise, tolerating the continuation of such practices carves an irreparable dent into the whole notion of fundamental rights upon which democratic ideals are premised.

*Salma Maoulidi is an activist and the Executive Director of the Sahiba Sisters Foundation in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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