There are at least 3 parties to every person's bordered entry to a country:

1. The country the person is entering;

2. The person entering;

3. The country of citizenship of the person entering or the country that issued the travel document (or ID substituting for a travel document).

Party #1 and #2 are intuitive for most people, but why should one be dependent on their home country to be able to enter a different country?

A relic of the nation-state monopoly on issuance of passports combined with their multi-lateral agreement to only accept passports (with limited exceptions) as travel documents for lawful bordered entries.

If your country of citizenship won't or can't issue your passport, you'll likely be nailed to one place or borderless zone (see my list of passport attack vectors in the comments). This is why confiscating someone's passport is considered such a powerful tool of control, whether by an individual or an oppressive govt actor.

This phenomenon of dependence on the third party mentioned above results in one of the biggest (and little discussed) benefits of dual and multiple citizenship. If you can swap 2, 3 or more countries into that third party slot issuing your travel document, your dependence (and vulnerability to) any one country becomes more limited.

Note, I'm not referring to visa-free access granted by the 2nd or 3rd citizenship.

Even if the country issuing the passport doesn't have ANY visa-free access to other countries. The hypothetical "weakest" passport with zero visa-free access has value.

It removes the 3rd party (document issuing nation-state) involvement from human freedom of movement.

Of course, the tradeoff is that the person using it may have to reinvent the wheel by obtaining visas to enter as a citizen of that country whereas a different citizenship (with accompanying passport) may already grant you visa-free access to your destination country.

A potentially time-consuming hassle.

At present, the closest corollary (excepting the stateless and refugees who might be entitled to refugee travel doc.), would be citizenship in a country with very poor visa-free access, but that reliably issues passports to its citizens.

Would having such citizenship and accompanying "visa-needy" passport be worthwhile? For those interested in maximum freedom from state and contingency plans, I believe very much so.

This is why I often recommend people pursue adding citizenship in so-called third world countries if they qualify by ancestry, and also why I believe there would still be a market for citizenship by investment in a country with extremely poor visa-free access.

The citizenship granting the "visa-needy" passport as a canvas for visas has significant value for freedom of movement.

#citizenship #passport #dualcitizenship #visafreetravel #citizenshipbyinvestment