Travel politics: Is 'passportism' being turned into a sly tool of racism and Islamophobia?

With his American passport, Rollo did not need a visa; he could simply walk into France. With my Indian passport, not only did I need to apply for a visa, but I also had to interview in person at a French consulate and pay a visa application fee. It would be too vague to call this discrimination racism. The scholar SrÄ‘an Mladenov Jovanović writes about the importance of a separate term that differentiates citizenship-based discrimination from racism and xenophobia. We know that the inequality of passportism has been baked into immigration policy. But tourism has also played a big part…