Passport discrimination considered totally normal when it's structurally identical to racism
So I was reading about visa refusal rates that the US State Department publishes annually: basically a ranked list of how likely you are to get rejected for a visa based on your passport. And something hit me.
We have built an entire global system where your life opportunities are massively determined by which country you were born in. Something you had zero control over. And not only is this accepted, governments publish the statistics openly and call it "transparency."
If a company published annual reports showing they reject 60% of black applicants but only 10% of white ones, and justified it with "well statistically this group has lower productivity on average" - that company would be sued into the ground. That reasoning is called disparate impact discrimination and it's illegal in most democracies. The logic itself is considered impermissible, not just the intent.
But swap "skin color" for "passport" and suddenly it's just... foreign policy. Completely normalized. The State Department publishes it as a routine bureaucratic document.
You could say "There's no right to a visa", but neither do employers have a legal "obligation" to hire anyone, yet we still banned discriminatory hiring criteria. And at least with a discriminatory employer you can apply somewhere else. There is exactly one US government. One UK Home Office. One Schengen system. If they reject you, that's it. No competing options, no market alternative, no appeals that actually go anywhere most of the time. The monopoly on the decision makes it even worse than the employment analogy, not better.