Regulating transnational flows of people: an institutional analysis of passports and visas as a regime of mobility

• Published in: Identities (Yverdon, Switzerland) Vol. 11; no. 3; pp. 351 - 376
• Main Author: Wang, Horng-luen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.07.2004
• Subjects: Citizenship; Geographic Mobility; Globalization; Identity; Politics; Sovereignty; Taiwan
• ISSN: 1070-289X
• DOI: 10.1080/10702890490493527

This article challenges the widely held "mobility thesis" by examining the current regime of mobility in regulating transnational flows of people - namely, passports and visas - from an institutionalist perspective. An institutional device linking individuals to the state, the passport is a manifestation of both citizenship and sovereignty. As such, the passport has to be situated in a broader international context in which "organized hypocrisy" (Krasner 1999) underlies the principle of sovereignty. Furthermore, through the "rite of institutions" (Bourdieu 1991), the passport provides foundations for identification, classification, and trust for individuals. The Taiwan passport provides vivid illustrations of how identification, classification, and trust have been breached by organized hypocrisy and how such a breaching has been experienced by individual citizens. However, it is also shown that some capable individuals, through the leverage of their economic power, are able to circumvent or even take tactical advantage of the current system. The political overtone of the Taiwan passport has exposed the nature of the regime of mobility that has often been depoliticized and undertheorized. Just as passports issued by different states are of different values, there has been an inequality of mobility structured by power asymmetries and economic inequalities in the world system. Such an inequality of mobility may have become enlarged under the impact of globalization but has gone mostly unnoticed. Individuals may try to increase their mobility through various economic means, but differentiated access to mobility may have further reproduced and enhanced unequal social, economic, and political relations. (Original abstract)