Passports

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27750, 30 August 1955, Page 10

Passports

New Zealand, a pioneer in travel restrictions, and Australia, still remembered for its immigration literacy tests in impossible languages, have been left well behind by modern methods of checking the free movement of peoples. Both countries should be well content that this is so. The States of Eastern Europe have practical reasons for permitting only those of their citizens they believe to be politically reliable to cross their frontiers. Their strict qualitative and quantitative limits are at least easy to understand. Why their example should be followed, even to a minor degree, by other countries, notably the United States, is more mysterious. Quite apart from the obvious justice of the American Supreme Court’s ruling that lawabiding citizens have an inherent right to travel if they wish, the administration of the American restrictions seems to have served r.o useful purpose—rather the reverse. What harm could a visit overseas by a Lattimore or a Robeson have done the United States compared with the harm done by the public uproar when they were refused passports? Just as the United States is beginning to relax its attitude to passports, South Africa has enthusiastically entered the control business.

Travel is one way by which the citizens of different countries can come to know each other better. It is difficult enough to travel nowadays because of currency troubles, without arbitrary bureaucratic control of passports. The freedom of the individual is democracy’s best weapon in the twentieth century’s ideological battle. It does not make sense to abridge this freedom in South Africa or anywhere else.