“… is your passport to your success.” Anything that can take you to your dreams, higher grounds or greener pastures is likened to a “passport” stressing its importance. For a traveler, it can literally take them to where they want to go. Without one, they can’t cross borders. It offers you lessons of life learned the easy or hard way, but who minds when the prospect of seeing the world comes with that document called passport.
Owning a passport is the first step to traveling to foreign shores. It opens up a world of huge options, possibility and freedom. Thus, the power of the passport can be ignored
The Great Possibilities that Passports Bring
A passport from the United States allows its citizens free access to 172 other countries. This is one of the perks of being a citizen of the United States. Suzy Strutner, author of Not All Passports Are Created Equal posted in The Huffington Post writes about the power of the passports from the different nations around the planet
Not every passport has the same power. Strutner continues, “… Residents of Iraq, for example, can access only 31 countries with their passports. Venturing away from Afghanistan? Your options dwindle to 28 countries.”
Do you know the power of your passport?
According to Henley and Partners’s
In an April 2015 post by Becky Pemberton for Daily Mail Online, The Most Powerful Passports in the World Revealed (and the ones that barely let you travel anywhere), the power of the passports issued in the different countries and territories around the world is shown. Each country receives a score based on the calculations done by Henley and Partners’s using the Visa Restrictions Index. The countries are then ranked according to the scores made by this global consulting firm, which specialize in residence and citizenship planning.
According to the index, “The best passports include those from Finland, USA, Germany and the UK.” “Lowest ranking countries include Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Surprisingly, North Korea and Cuba, thought to get the bottom places, actually ranked better than expected at 86 and 69 respectively, from a total ranking of 94.
The Implication of the Ranking
If only you have the power to decide which passport to apply for, you must be ogling for a US-issued passport, right? Considering the difficulty involved in becoming a US citizen, you can make it easier on yourself if you will set your sights somewhere else. If it is a powerful passport you want, you have other options aside from the United States. “…Finland, Germany, Sweden, the UK” along with the United States are ranking in the first position. This means you can “access 174 countries visa-free. “
Henley and Partners said: ‘In today’s globalised world, visa restrictions play an important role in controlling the movement of foreign nationals across borders. This means that virtually all countries will require that you have a visa if you are considered a non-national, but wish to enter their borders and stay there for a certain period of time regardless of your legal purpose.
Unfortunately, you have no control to decide where you will get your passport and no command as to how much power it has. It is a reflection of geopolitics between your country and the other nations around the world. What you can do is to find out where can you go without a visa and make the most out of your choices and find out what will it take to get a visa for those destinations restricted by your passport.
