Until I married the Gentleman Friend, and eventually became eligible for a British passport, I travelled on my Pakistani passport. Even today, years later, my heart beats faster in fear as I approach immigration at any country, including the UK. And I am the most privileged of people. I have a UK passport now, and even when I had a Pakistani one I was travelling as a woman (less threatening than a Pakistani man), fluently English speaking and able to downplay my accent, Western attire with head uncovered, the confidence of an educated and well-travelled background, and with stamps in my passport attesting that I was eligible to travel to the US to attend an Ivy League. For those who lack such advantages it is infinitely more difficult.
Until I got my UK passport, I carried around a giant plastic envelope full of documents: bank statements, letters, property ownership documents, proof of employment or university enrolment, travel insurance, onward flights, printouts of hotel bookings, addresses of people I knew in the country, etc. If you are someone not from one of these countries (in which case you know the plastic envelope well), but have ever been on a flight with people from South Asia or Africa or other countries with bad passports, you will have seen people clutching those plastic envelopes.
Even today, while I travel internationally a great deal, I carry a great many documents in electronic form in my phone just in case, as a non-white person whose ‘place of birth’ in my passport is given as ‘Pakistan’, I won’t be considered legitimate. And every time I cross a border – which I’ve done many, many times in the past few years – I’m grateful that I can just… get up and do it and worry only about what happens at the crossing, not the whole palaver beforehand.
And there are countries, worst of all in the Middle East and East Asia where, if you are unfortunate enough to be from South Asia or Africa etc, you are spoken to like an animal – until they realise that the passport you have slid before them is embossed with the lion and the unicorn. The rudeness and aggression remains but the contempt is reduced. Out of the corner of your eye you see the terror in the face of a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi, clutching the plastic envelope and the passport they were born with, being taken away for added questioning. And you thank your stars for having your talisman, your good passport, whilst feeling rage that the talisman worked as it did.
This all was originally intended as a comment on this excellent article by Anne Moraa posted to Metafilter, but the discussion there veered off to the distinction between expat and immigrant so the moment had passed. I doubt very many of those who read Metafilter have had to deal with bad passports anyway.