My 15 worst travel experiences on a Pakistani passport (Part 1)

Last Friday, I became a U.S. citizen. The main difference between having a green card (which I had for the last 5 years) and citizenship is (a) being able to vote, and (b) being able to travel like a normal human being. 

I missed the boat on (a) by about a month but this post is concerned with (b). People from brown and black countries often have a really tough time explaining to the rest of the world (not just Westerners) just how insanely challenging and spirit-breaking international travel is. 

Some of this ignorance comes from them thinking their experience is representative: if travel is seamless for them, it must be so for everyone. Others are aware of things like "visas" but believe that it's a small bureaucratic hurdle, akin to getting a driver's license. A select few, because their friends, family, or educational background, go so far as to be basically aware of the reality of first world vs third world citizenship. No one, however, truly grasps the totality of the experience without being directly affected by it. 

Even within this discriminated world of brown and black countries, however, Pakistan stands apart.

When there are 199 countries and your going from 198 to 192 is considered "good news," that's bad news. I am going to try to give a bit of a taste of or window into that world in this post by ranking my worst travel experiences. Because there are so many, I have broken this post down into two parts. Check back in a couple days for Part 2. 

There are, broadly speaking, three categories: (1): visas and applications thereof, (2) airport security, and (3) customs and immigration. 

The incidents/episodes are ranked on four dimensions, each graded on a 5 point scale. 

1. Annoying: how much of a pain in this ass was this experience? This is basically a logistical/time/distance/money issue, but also a mental stress issue. 

2. Insulting: how much of an asshole was the other party to me? How bad was I made to feel?

3. Humiliation: this is subtly related to #2 but distinct in that it is a measurement of insult to the group to which I belong, rather than me personally. So if the thing I am suffering is because all Xs (Brown people, Muslims, Pakistanis etc) are shunted off into one place/line/form, then that is a #3 thing, not a #2 thing.

4. Sad: this is a measure of despair, but for society, not for me. It basically connotes "Is this what this has come to? I weep for humanity" etc etc.  

Therefore, the theoretically worst score any possible incident could get is 20 (5 points on each dimension). Ok let's begin, from "best" to worst. Part 2 (coming soon) will cover the "top" experiences but in this post I am doing #15 to #9. 

Ranking: 15

Country: Jamaica

Category: Visa

Year: 2007

All things considered, not too bad. Basically, I was going for spring break and (possibly) watching a World Cup match (which didn't end up happening but whatever). The reason for including this incident is that what was normally a nominal visa fee (surely not above 50-60 dollars) was hiked up to an unreal $320 because of the WC. Very, very few countries have (had) a tourist visa fee in the three figures, let alone in the hundreds of dollars.

Because this was an instance of a fellow member of the Global South trying to get theirs while the going is good, I didn't begrudge them. If you want to cash in because of a global sports tournament, go right ahead (this is the diplomatic equivalent of the Player Empowerment Era, which I thoroughly support). On the other hand, a 3 on the annoying scale because, on a grad student stipend, paying this much for a visa really stretched me. I mean, the ticket and visa cost the same basically. Any time other than college or grad school and I would rate this a 2 or maybe even a 1, but $320 was a really, really, really big deal in 2007. 

Total score: 3 (Annoying 3)

Ranking: 14

Country: Germany/Schengen

Category: Visa

Year: 2006

A really nice illustration of the difference between the haves and have-nots.

I was a senior in college, doing a study abroad in Paris. Everyone else in my study abroad program, roughly 7-8 people, was an American (a white American at that). Our program made us do a lot of activities together (going to restaurants, museums etc). The group often did things together but as time went on, also broke up into smaller groups, which did more voluntary socializing. 

Either way, about two thirds of the way through the semester, a couple of them come to me and say "Hey, we're planning on taking the train to Strasbourg [a city on the German border] and getting bikes and riding around for a weekend and picking apples/strawberries/[some other idyllic activity which I don't recall specifically]. Are you in?" 

I looked at them and just laughed. "Guys, if you wanted me to do something like this, you should have told me weeks ago."

"But we just came up with the plan today/yesterday [I don't remember exactly]!"

"Haha. That's fine. But I can't come."

"Why not?"

"Because I will need a visa."

"Why would you need a visa? Aren't you already in Europe?"

Silly, naive children. "No. My Schengen visa is a student visa valid only for France. If I want to go anywhere else in Europe, I have to apply for a visa."

"How long will that take?"

"Weeks."

"Oh."

Cue awkward silence.

"It's okay. You guys go ahead and have fun."

In the grand scheme of things, not being able to ride bikes on the Franco-German border with a bunch of American college students is hardly a travesty of justice. Nonetheless, I remember this incident very vividly because of how clueless my (well-meaning, nice, sweet) American friends were and how sharp the contrast is in life experiences between people who are allowed to travel freely and people who are not. They literally could not fathom that I could not just "decide" to take the train to Strasbourg and bike over the German border. 

Thus this was quite a sad incident, but not really insulting, humiliating, or annoying in any meaningful way.

Total score: 3 (Sad 3)

Ranking: 13

Country: U.S.

Category: Customs and immigration

Year: 2010 or 2011 (not sure)

The most stressful geographic location in Canada is U.S. territory: CBP desks at the main Toronto airport. YYZ is one of those rare airports where "American" immigration is handled on the departure side. Thus between the time you are in the security line and the time you are the Duty Free shops/restaurants/bars, you are technically in America. 

This is where bad things happen to brown people. I mean, Toronto airport shows up at three times in this series. Standing in that line is so damn nerve wracking. Am I going to be sent to "secondary", a dystopian purgatory where you may be detained for hours on end for no reason? Am I gonna get an officer who actually respects me and treats me nicely for a change, like immigration officers in most other countries? Or is this going to be the typical CBP dick?

It was a typical CBP dick.

Conversation starts innocently enough. "What were you doing in Canada?" "Visiting family" "How long were you here" "5-10 days [I don't remember]" "What do you do in the US?" "I'm a PhD student".

That's where it turned. 

The guy asked me how I had money to travel if I'm a student. I said, well, as a PhD student, I get a stipend and I happened to be a fellowship at the time, which I mentioned. The guy, a black dude who looked a bit like Gus from Breaking Bad, was clearly in a gruffy mood now.

"Why are we giving money to people like you when we could be giving to our own?" he said aggressively. 

What am I supposed to say to that? Note, even the slightest whiff of "hostility" or "attitude" lands me in secondary at best and Guantanamo at worst. 

I did not say: Hey, asshole, you haven't given me shit. This is not government money. The University of Chicago is a private institution that chose to give me this (measly amount of) money.

I did not say: Yeah, buddy, without people "like me", your universities would be wastelands. 

No, these were mere shower thoughts, the perfect retort you play in your head in a situation after the fact. In the real world, I shuffled my feet, put my lips tightly together, looked down at my shoes, look at the computer in front of him, looked at the desk, anywhere other than his eyes. I mumbled something to the effect of "I don't know," shrugged my shoulders, and he stamped my passport with a "pfft" and gave me one last shake of the head to remind me it was my fault his life sucked. On I went. 

High insulting score here should be obvious. A non trivial sad score because, perhaps foolishly, I would have thought a black dude would/should understand arbitrary discrimination by people in uniform and with authority over people with neither. Oh well. 

Total score: 6 (Insulting 4 + Sad 2)

Ranking: 12

Country: Bangladesh

Category: Visa

Year: 2017

I needed to go to Bangladesh and India for fieldwork for research for my book. After a perfunctory attempt at India -- I did not even bother applying -- I  focused on Bangladesh. I figured that at the very least I have a shot here. I thought about applying just as a tourist but I figured that would be asking for trouble for so many reasons.

Anyway, on November 1, 2017, I trudge up to the Bangladesh embassy and apply for a research visa. The guy at the window is a 20- or early 30-something with glasses, nerdy professional looking guy. He asks me to fill out a form and appears to be doing everything by the book. His colleague, a woman in her 30s, is handling the other window. Then their boss, an older dude with a typical South Asian male bald spot and a very typical South Asian bureaucrat manner enters the area from a door in the back, I guess doing his rounds and getting an appraisal of what's going on. He saunters over to my window, hovers over Professional Nerd's shoulder, takes one look at my passport, and says "PAKISTANI passport?!? No, no, no." Like, he's literally shaking his head. And I'm like bhai, can you at least look at the visa application first, or at least pretend to. So yeah, that was the first bad sign. 

Anyway, they said check back in a month so I did. After a couple days of unsuccessful calls, I finally got through to them. They said we are waiting for police clearance from Bangladesh. I ask how long that might take. They said they don't know or can't say. I say well I have air tickets (flight scheduled for Dec 25 or so) and Airbnbs to cancel. They said ok great good luck with that. 

I reached out to a friend who is half Bangladeshi and who may have had a contact or two. Helpful as she was, there was not much she or anyone she knew could do.

I waited until about December 15 and then cancelled my tickets and Airbnb. I knew I wasn't getting a visa. While I got refunded the fare and Airbnb costs, no one was going to pay me back the time in setting up invitation letters from Bangladesh universities, emails to random Dhaka think tanks etc. 

I went back to the embassy to collect my passport. I got a scare because the doors were locked and they said through the intercom the consular section is closed, even though I was told to collect my passport at that hour. But I insisted with some sob story about how far I had to come and it was bitterly cold that day and I said I just want my passport back because I have to travel elsewhere (not true) and they said fine and buzzed me in.

If they had turned me away that day and made me come back a third time in the dead of winter, this would have a very high annoying score, but as it stands, it was moderately annoying. Humiliating score is fairly high because of Bald Bureaucrat's exclamation of "PAKISTANI passport" that first day. I don't give it a sad score because frankly I was not surprised and if there's one country who deserves to give us shit, it's Bangladesh. 

Total score: 7 (Annoying 3 + Humiliation 4 = 7)

Ranking: 11

Country: Spain (but basically U.S.)

Category: Airport security

Year: 2015

The setup: this was my second trip to the city of Barcelona but first with Camp Nou tickets. I saw not one but two games, and real doozies too: a CL knock out tie against City in which Messi had a night that can only be described as "filthy" and a tight Clasico (2-1) with a lateish Suarez winner. It was pretty much the perfect 5-6 days.

Anyway, my flight back to the U.S. is supposed to take off very early morning. I end up at the airport around 6 a.m. but the flight is delayed by 6-8 hours. 

Somehow my bleary-eyed self somehow gets through this interminable wait with the aid of bad orange juice and a greasy breakfast sandwich. I read a little but I'm too sleepy, I surf a little but the screen is hurting my eyes.

I trudge my way to the boarding area, where I hear my name called for "additional" screening. Uh oh. Of course, I had had the dreaded "SSSS" on my boarding pass.

Now, some background. The letters "SSSS" on the bottom right of your boarding pass means you will get extra screening off on the side in the boarding area: more questions, your bags opened, your passport and documents checked, etc. You only know for sure when you check in, and when you do, then you know you're in for a ritualistic 10-30 minute humiliation. Here's what the top google result for SSSS says:

I am here to tell you that every single time (or 85-90% of time at least) I flew into the U.S. from a place other than Pakistan, I had this SSSS thing on my boarding pass. Why other than Pakistan, you ask? It's basically this, but for airport security:

You see, Homeland Security has set it up such that when you are coming from a scary (i.e. brown) place, the security everyone receives is insane. So in those cases, they are not worried about isolating the "problematic" individual. If I'm coming in from Pakistan, that means I'm flying through Dubai/Abu Dhabi/Istanbul/Doha and DHS trusts those places to treat all US-bound flights like potential flying missiles and everyone is patted down and questioned accordingly.

But if I'm coming in from Mexico or Canada or Europe, well, then I signify individualistic trouble to the American state and I need to be differentiated from the peaceful masses. Thus the SSSS every time going into the US from Western places. And without fail, every time I got the boarding pass, I would seethe. "It's so goddamn obvious what's going on," I would mutter to myself, my wife (if she was there), and the guy doing the SSSSing, who would plead ignorance but know exactly what was up.

Anyway, so back to the story: I'm in Barcelona, going to Boston, so of course, I have SSSS on my boarding pass. Sure enough, my name comes over the loudspeaker and I am called to a literal pen, as in for pigs, where my shoes come off, my bag is essentially strip searched, I am asked dumb and lame questions about what I do and where I'm going and...

Suddenly, I hear a loud yell in the distance, maybe 20-30 yards to my left. It was not a pained exclamation but an excited one, but so involuntary that almost sounded like a dog yelping, like a "woah" combined with a "wow" with a "ruff". I look up and suddenly there was a throng where there was a basically empty airport hallway a few seconds prior. There is a crowd of men with phones and cameras in their hands, walking backwards at pace like some family of bizarro lobsters, all the while clicking furiously. I turn my head a degree to see what the fuss is about. This entire sequence, by the way, takes less than second.

From the crowd emerges one Lionel Andres Messi Cuccitini. Impish, head bent down, flustered, and with an embarrassed smile that suggests "Hey guys, let me through, what is the fuss about?" Next to him is Javier Mascherano, more somber and determined to work himself through the crowd with the same hard-headedness that he brings to midfield duels. I slap my head. "International break. Right." The two are headed back to South America. They're at the airport. They walk right in front of me. 

But I can't get a selfie or a picture or autograph (not that they were doing many, but just by being in that throng, I would have got one) because I am being discriminated against, stuck in this random half open jail with my shoes off and my suitcase open. I was literally within 5-10 feet of them. This cabbie could have been me

Maximum possible sad score, obviously. Moderately high humiliation score because of the SSSS thing. 

Total score: 8 (Sad 5 + Humiliating 3 = 8)

Ranking: Tied-9th

Country: U.S.

Category: Customs and Immigration

Year: 2003

This was the apogee of the Global War on Terror/Bushie era. They had put this awful "NSEERS special registration" thing in place. 

Simply put, this was a racist surveillance and tracking program. It felt very, very Nazi. On arrival, people from Muslim countries were basically shunted off to a separate room ("Secondary") where they would undergo extra screening and questioning and fingerprinting. They would take your documents away in these yellow and red folders (oh how we prayed for a yellow folder, green and blue was out of the question). We had to "register" on the way out as well, unheard of in the U.S. Worst of all, we had to go into NSEERS offices (ours was in Columbus) 6-8 weeks in the semester in these giant white vans and get finger printed and show that, yes, we were still students and not (yet) terrorists. 

The system's discrimination and racism was so breathtakingly open. On arrivals, you would have to routinely add 3-4 hours to your flight time compared to normal people: between the flight landing and you getting in the cab could take as long as 4-6 hours, easy. This was especially when lots of Muslims arrived at the same time, i.e if an Emirates flight landed close to an Etihad flight at the same time as a Saudi flight etc.

NSEERS registration at entry was really awful [covered in Part 2], but on exit it wasn't that bad an inconvenience. But the initial stages of the program were a total disaster regardless. In December 2003, I was going home for winter break. 

There was one guy, on one computer, in one broken down office in some broken down underbelly of JFK, handling all NSEERS exits. There were a lot of Brown people flights slated to take off (most leave the US east coast at a similarish time, say 7-11 pm). Absolute, total choas ensued. Imagine an office no bigger than the janitor's closet, with one guy and one computer, and outside there is a narrow hallway with the longest line of brown men aged 18-45 you could ever hope to see. There were at least a half dozen brown airlines whose flights were delayed substantially that day. The whole time I was so stressed and nervous about the delay and possibility missing the flight. 

After waiting at least two hours in this line, I rushed to the gate and literally sprinted to the plane along with 4-5 other Pakistanis. As we were got on, out of breath and flustered, the captain was on the PA, updating passengers (evidently one of several updates) about the reason for the delay. I can just imagine the cynical traveler in his/her seat thinking "There goes PIA again, another delay, yawn" but in this case it really, really wasn't their fault.

When we got on to the plane in our disheveled state, the plane erupted in applause. Seriously, just like the meme, everyone did clap. It was a nice moment, and helped lower the humiliation score, but this was a harrowing experience overall.

Total score 9 (Annoying 4 + Humiliation 3 + Sad 2 = 9)

Ranking: Tied-9th

Country: Italy

Category: Airport security

Year: 2006

Some pretty run of the mill discrimination here. I was in Venice flying back to Paris, where I was studying abroad (covered in Part 2). I was a broke college student so was flying Ryan Air, and therefore was not at the regular airport but the special Ryan Air airport 45-60 mins away, like all other Ryan Air airports.

Anyway, this airport did not see much non European traffic and certainly did not see many Pakistani passports. The security people instantly took me aside when I showed them my passport. I did not get an extra pat down or a prying question or three, no sir. I got taken into a small room with one white light and no windows, with two uniformed officers sitting across a grey table. They opened my bag, took everything out (there wasn't much in it), unzipped, unclasped, and unclicked things I did not even know existed in my suitcase. They asked me where I lived and where I was going and how long I had been in Venice and what I had been doing there. 

Just for the record, the modal passenger at these Ryan Air airports is a drunk and overweight British lady in her 40s with skin the color of a beetroot. The security and overall atmosphere is (or was)...lax, shall we say. And yet they had somehow found the Seal Team 6 of the airport to deal with me. I found that pretty sad. 

After a few humiliating minutes, I was on my way. Just another day of flying while Pakistani.

Total score: 9 (Humiliating 5 + Sad 3 + Annoying 1)

Update: Here is Part 2, counting down #8 to #1.