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Mar 16th 2016, 10:45 by B.R.
FEW things in life can be as frustrating as applying for a Russian visa. First
there is a never-ending form: a list of all the countries you have visited in
the past 10 years with exact dates, details of past employers and managers,
education history, insurance numbers it is endless. Then you are supposed to
procure an official letter of invitation from the organisation you are
visiting. As if that were not enough, you have to schlep to some pokey office
on the other side town to have your fingerprints taken. All in all, the process
cost Gulliver about a month of his time and The Economist over a hundred quid
of its cash. My trip to St Petersburg was for a single night.
I moaned about this to an Indian colleague, but he refused me any sympathy.
Now you know what I have to go through every time I enter Britain, he sniffed.
Indeed. Brits like me take hassle-free travel for granted. According to the
latest Visa Restrictions Index, released last month by Henley & Partners, a
relocation firm, I can enter 173 of the world s 218 countries (not including my
own) either without a visa or with a visa on arrival. That compares with just
52 that my Indian colleague can (most of which are far-flung Pacific or
Caribbean islands).
Britain is joint third on Henley's list of the world s most useful passports
(see table). Germany comes top. Its citizens can gain visa-free access to 175
countries. At the other end of the list, it is little surprise to find some of
the world s most troubled nations, including Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia.
It will be interesting to see which way the world moves when it comes to visas.
As more nations adopt biometric passports, there should, in theory, be scope
for further relaxation of restrictions. And generally as countries economies
become more global they also tend to loosen visa requirements for travellers.
Over the past two years, for example, citizens of the United Arab Emirates have
been able to travel visa-free to 45 more countries than before, according to
Henley. This includes to the Schengen Area, a group of 26 European nations that
have abolished passport controls, making it the first Arab country to be
granted a European visa waiver. But as the EU creaks under the weight of its
migrant crisis, how many more nations will be afforded this privilege in the
coming years? It is not only Europe that is drawing in its horns. America, too,
is tightening its waiver programme following the terrorist attacks in Paris.
And that is before the possibility of the country electing an anti-immigration
president like Donald Trump.
Keeping up barriers to entry is not only frustrating for travellers, it is also
probably short-sighted. As we wrote in a leader earlier this year:
Visas are necessary evils. They offer governments a way to control their
borders, whether to regulate the flow of immigrants or to pick out threats to
security. But the paperwork and fees they entail also deter legitimate tourists
and business travellers. Researchers at the Cato Institute, a libertarian
think-tank, reckon that eliminating all travel visas to the United States would
add between $90 billion and $123 billion in annual tourist spending. By one
estimate, introducing visa restrictions can lower trade and foreign direct
investment between a pair of countries by as much as 25%.
For all that, it will be some time before Afghans are allowed to globetrot in
the same hassle-free way as Germans.