Passport privilege is brittle

Things solid can suddenly break: reflections on citizenship, identity, and inheritance

NOTE: This newsletter is in response to Lauren Razavi’s call for essays on passport privilege, immigration, expat life, travel, and global mobility.

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The truth about my passport privilege is often that I’m scared to talk about it.

How can you be in Europe for so long without a visa?

Because I have a German passport.

Oh! And how did you get that?

I’m never sure what to say next. Because my grandfather left Germany in 1934, deprived of citizenship. Because Jewishness. Because the guilt of a nation. Because terrible atrocity.

Because The Holocaust.

The conversation is more fraught today than ever. How am I supposed to tell this story amid rising antisemitism around the world? Amid a terrible war that only seems to unleash new horrors and open new wounds, rather than correcting for old ones? How do I navigate a conversation in which I suspect the person on the other side wants to talk about genocide, just not the genocide I’m talking about?

Best to avoid the whole thing.

But then it comes up. I’m sitting across from my real estate agent, a blond-haired, blue-eyed German living in Spain ever since her Erasmus university program more than a decade ago. To my right is the agent for the seller, who asks for my passport—the one attached to your NIE, he says.

I take out the dark auburn-colored booklet with the German seal and hand it to him.

My agent gives me a surprised look. Oh! I didn’t know you were German! she says.

I didn’t know you had a 1-year-old, I reply.

Even I can’t tell if that sounded defensive or if it sounded like flirting, but she doesn’t press me further. We’re in the middle of conducting business.

So, the seller’s agent says as he hands back the passport, What do you think of everything going on in the U.S. right now?

I can’t believe he’s asking me this. Where I come from, we generally don’t ask politically loaded questions just as we’re negotiating a real estate transaction.

Is that really the kind of question to ask right now? I reply.

Definitely defensive.

I’m a liberal and I believe in things—free speech, due process, the promise of the American dream—so I’m appalled at what’s going on now in the country of my birth. It makes me very sad and not a little angry, and it makes me want to not go back home, at least not until something changes.

But then I think about my other passport, the one from the country that systematically deprived my ancestors of all rights as a citizen and dignity as a human, just before murdering as many millions as they could. My grandmother, for as long as I knew her, never forgave the German state, which, in many cases, prioritized the murder of Jews even over its own war aims. So great was their belief in the seriousness of the “the Jewish problem.”

Yet this is what I remember every time I have a feeling of estrangement from the U.S.: I’m not a refugee. I’m not escaping death camps or war. I left the U.S. before Trump was re-elected to term two, left for reasons of personal fulfillment, not economic necessity or physical safety. I left with money in the bank and with every option to return when I choose.

It’s a confusing mix of feelings. I’m in mourning for the death of the U.S. as I’ve known it since I was a kid, while at the same time living on borrowed privilege born out of an even more terrible past.

My own country is disappearing people to foreign prisons in a style indistinguishable from that of a banana republic dictatorship. The country that gave me my EU passport only did so in an attempt to atone for the worst atrocity history has recorded. My identity as an American fades with each new wound inflicted on the ideas that once made it a light to the world. My identity as a Jew, practically non-existent as a child, only grows with each new expression of moral confusion about the events that got us here.

I wasn’t raised Jewish; my mother is not a Jew—thus, according to Jewish law, culture, and tradition, I am not Jewish. Nonetheless, I would certainly have been shipped to the camps. Jewish in the eyes of those with the guns and the gas chambers.

Meanwhile, my identity as a global citizen is what I grasp on to, forged as it was by my study of philosophy and the obvious practical fact that where one happens to have been born in the world is a matter of pure chance. Certainly, I ought not be congratulated for having had the good luck to be born in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Nor do I bear any responsibility for the circumstances of my grandfather and his family’s flight from Germany.

All that said, my history—history in general—is a reminder that we don’t know which part of the story we’re in. The happy ending? The calm before the storm? The darkness before the dawn? Germany was in many ways the most advanced, educated, artistic, and philosophical country in the world just before it launched its genocidal project. What has felt like luck and extreme privilege of my U.S. passport today could turn into a Scarlet Letter of shame and misfortune tomorrow. Indeed, it seems that is the direction we may be headed.

The borders and opportunities that have been open to me until now won’t necessarily be open in the future. There could easily come a time when people around the world look upon my U.S. citizenship and, rather than covet in envy, they hang their heads in sympathy—so far has the country fallen, into whatever calamitous dark future you can imagine.

And so the truth about my passport privilege is that it’s more brittle than you or I might think. Civilization is a fragile thing. Borders are not inviolable. Not yours, not mine. That much should be obvious by now.

Maybe this is the genes of my refugee ancestors talking, but nothing is permanent, and nothing is owed. Not wealth, not privilege, not citizenship, not passports. These are all things we’ve made up. They exist by the good grace of humanity and culture and tradition, and they can all disappear.

These documents we hold in our backpacks, these little booklets of blue or auburn, with their holographic stamps, and their heavy covers—they only represent promises made by governments. Which is to say they’re invaluable, right up until they’re not. Just something to remember when we talk about passports.

Of course, I’m not trading in my U.S. and German booklets for any others. I don’t want the enlightened dictatorial bureaucracy of Singapore. No pining for the detached, edenic ruggedness of New Zealand. And certainly not the petro-Islamic cosmopolitanism of the United Arab Emirates, which is somehow #1 on the list of global passport power rankings.

I still own my history, even if I’m not responsible for it, because, like it or not, it is all part of my identity. Born in the U.S., repatriated by Germany, choosing to live in Spain, which God knows has its own violent, tumultuous, unpredictable history. And accepting of all the burdens and privileges that come as a result, aware they could change at any time—aware they are changing right now.