Assessing Visa Costs on a Global Scale

Ettore Recchi,Lorenzo Gabrielli,Emanuel Deutschmann,Nodira Kholmatova

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3630141

Abstract

Visas are an important means for countries to regulate incoming mobility flows. Past datasets and quantitative research on visas have focused on visa waivers, ignoring the fact that visas, where demanded, can vary greatly by cost. This paper presents a novel dataset based on a manual collection of visa costs for travel between a global set of country pairs in seven different categories (tourist, work, student, family reunification, business, transit, and other). Our analyses reveal a strong global visa cost divide that raises important questions about the injustice regarding the right to travel for people located in different areas of the world. Whereas Europeans usually hardly have to work at all for travel permits, visa costs often amount to several weeks or even months of mean income in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Regression analyses show that these discriminatory practices are explained by the (lack of) economic prosperity and (flawed) state of democracy in the country of origin. This suggests that the global visa cost regime is driven by a rationale of economic and political control and exclusion rather than blatant racism. The result is a fundamentally paradoxical situation: The richer a country, the less its citizens pay for visas to go abroad (both in absolute terms and relative to their income).

Highlights

The possibly most basic fact of political life is that the planet we inhabit is split into self-organized units called, in common language, nations
If international mobility is conceptually distinct from spatial mobility tout court, it is because there are nations
In spite of its relevance, the cost of visa application has not been examined systematically by empirical research so far. This is the objective of the dataset we have created as part of the Global Mobilities Project (GMP) at the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) of the European University Institute (EUI) and that we present and analyse

Summary

Introduction*

The possibly most basic fact of political life is that the planet we inhabit is split into self-organized units called, in common language, nations (or, more precisely, states). Border control is pushed back to the aspiring movers’ doorsteps, so to speak This is a basic rationale for the existence of consulates, which lies more in the state interest of regulating international mobility in advance and far away from its territory than in the alleged protection of nationals residing or travelling abroad. Czaika et al’s (2018) yearly analysis highlights that visa requirements can become stricter under different pressures: unwanted waves of asylum-seeking, wariness for investments from certain countries, or retaliation against foes in international relations They classify bilateral visa dynamics into eight possible combinations: mutual gratification, bilateral opening, unilateral opening, negative turnaround, positive turnaround, unilateral closing, mutual retaliation (ibid, 8). We run a set of analyses based on the new Global Visa Cost Dataset, focussing on three research questions that partially build on one another: 1. How are visa costs stratified globally?

Do visa costs help explain mobility flows?

Methods

Findings

Conclusion