The passport is a permission slip from the government saying you are allowed to exist in other places. It is a small book with your photograph and your name and a number that the government assigned to you. Without it you cannot cross the line that somebody drew on a map. The passport says this person belongs to us. The passport says this person may leave but must come back. The passport is the leash. The border is where the leash runs out.

It costs two hundred dollars to get a United States passport in twenty twenty-six. Two hundred dollars. That is a poll tax for the planet. If you cannot afford two hundred dollars you cannot leave. You are trapped inside the borders of the country you were born in. The founding fathers did not need passports. Benjamin Franklin sailed to Paris whenever he felt like it. The passport requirement for American citizens did not become permanent until nineteen forty-one. For most of American history you could walk across any border on earth with nothing but your feet. The passport is a twentieth century invention and we treat it like it came down from God.

Paul Robeson was the most famous Black man in America in the nineteen forties. He was an actor and a singer and an athlete and a scholar and he spoke against racism and colonialism everywhere he went. In nineteen fifty the State Department revoked his passport. They did not charge him with a crime. They did not put him on trial. They took his passport and told him he could not leave the country. For eight years Paul Robeson was trapped inside the United States because he said things the government did not want him to say in other countries. The passport was the punishment. The passport was the prison without walls.

Charlie Chaplin left the United States in nineteen fifty-two to attend the London premiere of his film Limelight. While he was on the ship the Attorney General revoked his re-entry permit. Chaplin had lived in America for forty years. He had made the films that defined American cinema. He had never become a citizen. The government told him he was not welcome back. He moved to Switzerland and never returned. The country that made him famous decided he was too dangerous to let back in because he had spoken sympathetically about working people and the government called that communism.

I had my passport. I traveled. I went to Amsterdam and I went to London and I went to the places where they let you smoke marijuana in peace. But I knew people who could not leave Detroit because they could not afford the document. They could not afford the photograph. They could not afford the application fee. The world was closed to them not by a wall or a fence or a guard with a gun but by a price tag. Two hundred dollars stands between an American citizen and the rest of the human race. That is not security. That is a toll booth on freedom.

The refugee has no passport. The refugee has their feet and whatever they can carry. Forty million people on earth right now are moving without documents because the place they came from tried to kill them and the place they are going does not want them. The passport system was designed for people who have countries. The refugee does not have a country. The refugee has a direction. The passport says you belong somewhere. The refugee says I belong wherever I am not being killed. The passport does not understand that sentence. The border does not understand that sentence. But the refugee keeps walking.