The Future of Global Mobility

International Efforts to Create “Smart” Borders

These US security measures contain new security standards for travel documents, the systematic recording of flight passenger data (PNR), the introduction of an electronic entry permit (ESTA), an entry and exit regis­ter (EES) with biometric visa and a screen­ing system to prevent the boarding and arri­val of terrorism suspects. Nevertheless, to fa­cilitate travel, the US has initiated the Trus­ted Traveller programmes. These include among others the Global Entry programme, under which pre-approved travellers who are considered a low security risk by the authorities can have their interview after ar­ri­val instead. Participants in the programme can also use – like US nationals or green card holders – the PreCheck programme, which speeds up security checks at US air­ports.

The US is undoubtedly a pioneer in “intelligent” border efforts; however, since 2008 the EU commission has been driving forwards its own visa information system, which works with biometric data, as well as an entry and exit register and a system for flight passenger data. The European Travel Information and Authorisation Sys­tem (ETIAS) is expected to be operational in 2022. Similar to the US’s ESTA, it is in­tended for conducting security checks on trav­ellers from currently over 60 countries that do not need a visa for the Schengen area. The electronic Entry Exit System (EES) should also be put into service soon, and automatically monitor the travel move­ments of third state nationals at the exter­nal borders of the Schengen area. This IT system is intended to match those entering with those exiting and thus catch potential visa overstayers. Therefore, data sets includ­ing biometrics will be established for first-time arrivals in the Schengen area.

For decades, public health played only a minor role in international mobility management. The Covid-19 pandemic and associated containment measures, such as the designation of high risk areas and virus variant areas, have changed this for an un­foreseeable duration. Over the course of the Covid pandemic, international mobility has collapsed: in 2019, the year before the pan­demic, the global aviation industry carried more than 4.5 billion passengers. In the first year of the pandemic, over 108,000 travel restrictions linked to Covid-19 were imposed across the world. The number of flight pas­sengers fell by 60 percent. Numbers of new international migrants also remained well below previous estimates until mid-2020, and worldwide the pandemic is believed to have reduced their total by 2 million.

Such travel restrictions risk generating new distortions and a further widening of the gap between the Global North and the Global South. The (legitimate) wish to pro­tect populations in industrialised countries against the risk of infection can lead to a blanket disadvantaging of and discrimination against people from countries which do not have the means to vaccinate their popu­lations as successfully as the countries of the Global North, despite all the difficulties, have done. Moreover, the governments of developing nations also want to protect their populations against the risk of infection. But they have fewer options – especially because of their inadequate access to vaccines.

In the context of the pandemic, questions over the legitimacy of mobility con­trols are particularly pressing. The most recent reform proposals to the Schengen rules, which the EU intends to apply in the event of a pandemic to impose common entry bans, can therefore appear ambigu­ous. The planned formalisation could reinforce entry bans but also force the authorities to justify them.

The Issuing of Visas as the Key to International Mobility

At the heart of international mobility is the issuing of visas. This primarily serves to regulate tourism and business travel, as well as justifications for stays (such as labour migration, family reunification and asylum). To pre-empt undesired immigration, EU members and many other desti­nation countries pursue a parallel strategy. They resort to unilateral measures and tech­nologies to control numbers, and they use political pressure to induce countries of origin to cooperate on reducing irregular migra­tion. However, many countries of ori­gin now make their cooperation in migra­tion regulation conditional on destination countries taking seriously their demands for easier international mobility (for in­stance through free-of-charge visas or a generalised visa waiver for their citizens). This is the case with Turkey, for example, which has long been pressing the EU for a visa exemption and has repeatedly linked its demand to the threat of suspending its collaboration on migration control.

In 2020 EU member embassies and con­sulates received around 3.5 million visa applications for stays of up to three months in the Schengen area, a marked Covid-linked drop compared to 2019, when there were approximately 17 million applications. Of the applications submitted in 2020, around 85 percent were granted, slightly fewer than in 2019 (88 percent). However, rejection rates for certain regions of origin, especially sub-Saharan Africa, were far higher. And these numbers only offer a par­tial picture of the mobility blockages since they only take into account processed appli­cations; the many visa appli­cations that were abandoned or not even submitted for reasons of hopelessness are not included in the statistics.

Mobility for Germans looks entirely dif­ferent. German travellers are at the very top of global passport rankings; they have out­standing travel opportunities and access to almost all countries without needing to go through visa procedures. The Henley Pass­port Index currently has Germany in joint second place with South Korea; their citi­zens can enter 190 states without a visa. Only the passports of Singapore and Japan had higher rankings (192 states). Citizens of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian countries have a noticeably experience. African passports generally permit visa-free travel to only 20 to 25 percent of countries, mostly to neighbouring African nations.

In her thesis on the birthright lottery, Ayelet Shachar, the former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Reli­gious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, points to the privileges and disadvantages that result from acquiring citizenship. She argues that the acquisition of such politi­cal membership today corresponds to the acqui­sition of private property in times past.

Public Order or Structural Discrimination?

The EU’s 2001 Regulation on visas stipulates that the visa requirement is the stand­ard mechanism of its mobility system and that any potential exemption is merely a uni­laterally granted exception and a privi­lege. The Regulation, last revised in sum­mer 2021, also explains that all abuse of visa exemptions by nationals of a third coun­try must be combated “where they [the nationals] pose a threat to the public policy (ordre public) and the internal security of the Member State concerned”. In the event of inadequate cooperation by countries of origin, visa exemptions can be suspended. Thresholds have been set for this, for in­stance where a country of origin rejects over half of the EU’s readmission applications, or where fewer than four percent of asylum applications from the country are approved.

The Regulation indicates that greater migratory pressure is to be avoided, and it is obvious that EU members consider the European mobility regime as an instrument to regulate migration. The Regulation, which entered into force in 2009 and was last revised in 2019, also allows the issuing of visas to be used as an instrument to reward good cooperation on readmissions, or to sanction inadequate cooperation.

Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan commentator on current affairs and politics who gave one of the opening speeches at the May 2019 Future Affairs Forum on the digital revo­lution organised by the German Foreign Office in Berlin, considers the visa regime of developed countries to be structural racism, aiming to exclude the populations of the Global South from global mobility. The issuing of visas, she argues, reflects neo-colonial structures. It would seem that large swathes of the elites in Africa, the Arab world and South Asia share Nyabola’s position. The local press – and travel blogs – criticise not only the visa policies of the Global North but also the procedures em­ployed in embassies and at borders. These commentators raise accusations of institu­tional racism and racial profiling. Many complain about the humiliating nature of the procedures that applicants and those wishing to travel have to undergo. Such perceptions are counterproductive for win­ning over the Global South to the essential cooperation needed to meet the challenges of migration and forced displacement.

Elements of an International Framework

Discriminating mobility regulations are used to control migration not least because countries mistrust the identity documents and visa decisions of other governments. The Israeli historian and political analyst Yuval Noah Harari speaks of trust being the most important capital of any human society, referring to small communities as well as countries and international politics as a whole. To build trust, we need to strength­en multilateralism.

Two elements are required for a set of rules that shape international mobility: multilaterally negotiated objectives, strat­egies and procedures; and digital technol­ogies that facilitate mobility – as long as they are not an end in themselves but pur­sue political objectives. This need for a set of political rules derives inter alia from the risk that technologies might be used as sub­stitutes for such rules – for instance, when important actors such as the US rely on spe­cific techniques, these are subsequently adopted by international bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), and other countries then have to fol­low suit to avoid being left behind.

The Role of Private Service Providers

Private companies have already taken on im­portant functions in international mobil­ity management. This does not have to be a contradiction of the state’s sovereignty and control. On the contrary, states have brought in the private sector for support in pro­viding their consular services but also in securing their borders. This concerns air­lines in particular: under threat of substan­tial fines for omission, they carry out the relevant mobility control tasks for states at whose airports they land. Commercial migration services providers, such as CIBT (from the US) and the market leader VFS Global (founded in India, domiciled in Dubai), are now established, and are com­missioned by states to assume parts of visa processing or delivery functions. Technol­ogy companies offer the requisite hardware, software and data analysis.

In all cases, these companies act as data brokers, which means that they possess large amounts of data on rejected and ap­prov­ed visa applications, regular travellers and irregular migrants. This can lead to controversy since it is unclear under what jurisdiction these service providers might fall, and what legal avenues might be avail­able for complaints. However, the EU has at least pointed out that its General Data Pro­tection Regulation (GDPR) also applies to companies that carry out visa services for nationals of third countries, and that these companies have to ensure an appropriate level of protection for personal data.

The Canadian and Dutch governments along with the technology company Accenture and the World Economic Forum (WEF) are currently testing the Known Trav­eller Digital Identity system (KTDI) for flight passengers. Travellers using this system register biometric and cryptographic data about themselves, for instance on their mobile phones. On request and at their own discretion, these travellers then grant the authorities access to their verified per­sonal biometric, biographical and historical travel data to enable them to conduct risk assessments and pre-screening. KTDI allows journeys to be depicted and traced, with travellers interacting with authorities and private companies via mobile devices by mak­ing available historical and real-time data (“identity attributes”).

The project for a hotel check‑in for busi­ness travellers – which the German gov­ern­ment is using to test the construction of an infrastructure for the secure exchange of identity attributes, not just for the digital identities of humans but equally of institu­tions and objects (Internet of Things) – pur­sues similar objectives. Pilot projects would clarify if this approach can also be applied to nationals of third countries.

It will be indispensable to integrate the private sector into any international mobil­ity regime. Airlines, hotel chains, banks and financial service providers as well as insur­ances should act jointly with consulates and registry offices on a platform that not only offers travellers from third countries services under internationally agreed rules and processes them, but that can also issue verified identity attributes.

Ethical Issues

The most pressing ethical issue that con­cerns all “wallet” applications in which indi­viduals save information on their iden­tity derives from the imbalance in power between the representatives of state bodies and the owners of the data, in this case the travellers. It is debatable whether the latter ultimately retain control over their own per­sonal data and whether they will be allowed to pass on the data exclusively of their own free will and at their own dis­cretion – given immigration and control practices that demand personal data and at times empower agents to ask for passwords or even download the contents of mobile phones, computers or other devices.

This imbalance of power undoubtedly exists. It must be countered through bind­ing and actionable rules. This also applies to the data of travellers stored by author­ities and private service providers. Today they are inaccessible for those concerned (the data subjects): biometric data are stored at the consulate or by the company to which this service has been outsourced. The trav­eller’s digital self is controlled by others.

In the United Kingdom civil society or­ga­ni­sations have sued the Home Office, accus­ing the algorithms of the artificial intelligence employed by this ministry of being racist and discriminatory. Such risks must not be underestimated. It is also true, how­ever, that digital processes, when correctly conceived, can reduce the influence of dis­criminatory prejudices in decision-making.

An ethical debate about the details of the mobility system becomes necessary precisely when digital technologies are to be em­ployed. One criticism will be that a digital identity and trust system based on the im­balance of power between poorer and richer nations will not facilitate the mobil­ity of people from the poorer countries. Objections such as this must be taken seri­ously since people wishing to travel will probably continue to be rejected – and the suspicion of discriminatory prejudices, whether by natural persons or by algo­rithms, cannot be eliminated.

Beyond this, further fundamental issues will have to be clarified. How to deal with the tension between the travellers’ agency over their data and the requirement that a trust system, to be effective, must contain enough data? When has anyone attained “sufficient trust” – or will the expansion of certification and identification create a “spiral of distrust”, in other words an un­capped need for ever more, even better verified but never sufficient data? How to define a “key area” in which no data are collected, such as bank accounts? How to prevent an accountable person’s control being transferred to a machine when arti­ficial intelligence is used and the decision-making process is automated? Are the guarantees contained in Article 22 GDPR sufficient? And how to design effective objection and appeal processes?

The fundamental ethical issues also in­clude the objection that millions of people in the Global South will probably not attain a sufficiently high degree of trust due to their inadequate socioeconomic resources and limited access to digital resources, and will therefore continue to be excluded from travel to Germany and the EU. A counter-argument is the fact that in Germany and other OECD countries the unequal dis­tri­bution of resources also constrains citizens’ mobility: a high passport ranking is of little use for those who cannot afford to travel. Ultimately the objective is to develop tech­nical solutions that correspond to the politi­cal modernisation targets; safeguard individ­ual rights from an ethical perspective; priori­tise data protection; coincide with Chapter 3 of the GDPR; and endow everyone with rights, such as the right to transparent deci­sions, appeal, correction and compensation.

Political Objections

There needs to be a debate about political issues as well as ethical ones. They include the argument that governments tend to view decisions about access to the national territory as central to their activity and do not want to give up any competency in this regard. The counter-argument runs as fol­lows: a modernised travel system would not make decisions about longer stays, for instance for work purposes; such decisions would remain the countries’ “domaine réservé”. At least the debate would address the problem that a travel regime which is frustrating for the Global South would be counterproductive since it would thwart co­operation on other topics as well. In con­trast, a transparent process aiming to facili­tate global mobility for everyone would put co­operation before unilateralism and create new opportunities for cooperation so as to better manage irregular migration and the un­justified onward migration of asylum-seekers.

An international mobility policy would also be generally economically advanta­geous for all participating actors; we could therefore expect enough countries to join in such a project. Germany has the political leeway and technical competence to con­tribute to modernising international mobil­ity. It also has the will, as the December 2021 coalition agreement has shown in ref­er­ence to the issuing of visas.

Recommended Actions

• The German government should launch a national strategy to digitally modernise international mobility with its partners from business, technology and civil society.

• The government should also verify whether a trust system with a digital plat­form can be established as a public-private partnership and as a public body.

• Moreover, the German government should initiate an international policy dialogue that could result in negotiations on a Global Compact for International Mobil­ity, and one that enumerates the weaknesses of technical processes such as Trusted Traveller.

• Industry, service providers and social partners should participate: first, in the strategy dialogue; second, in building a digital platform to support mobility policy through the provision of services (e.g. insurance, monetary transactions, travel and tourism, consumer advice); and third, in the supervisory bodies of a trust system with a digital platform.

• Finally, it is important to include civil society, both in this dialogue and in the supervisory bodies of the trust system. There could, for example, be a digital platform that offers civil society services in information, advice and cooperation. Not least, this platform could serve as a means of exchanging with foreign civil society actors on issues of international mobility.