As I stood in line waiting to board the flight to Tirana, I looked over Juliane’s shoulder and noticed something unusual. A group of police were walking towards our gate.
Soon enough, the queue was flanked by border officers sporting tactical vests and weapons. One by one they went scanning passports, sowing panic as people shuffled around looking for documents. Even I began to get a little stressed. But when the cop reached me, took one nanosecond to glance at my passport photo and then trundled along without a second of hesitation, I knew what his thought process probably was: “White? Check. EU passport? Nothing to see here!”
As I looked around, I overheard some West African words interspersed with English and could make out a high number of green passports. I tried to guess where people were from— Nigeria, Cameroon, perhaps Mali? A majority of travelers from Sub-Saharan Africa was not quite what I was expecting to see on a flight between London and Tirana. But, I knew from my time in Gabon that traveling to parts of Africa can often take you on some roundabout journeys. Perhaps it was just a large group on holiday.
There were also, of course, many passengers from Albania, and in anticipation of this trip I’d bought Lea Ypi’s book Free and learned my first word in Albanian: rakia. I tried to imagine myself sitting next to someone on the plane, trying out my new vocabulary. Meanwhile, the border officers continued on through the line, hovering over and scrutinizing people, until they reached a tall bearded man. Away from the group, he was asked to produce some papers and step back against a wall for a photograph. I felt like he’d been through this before, because he was silent and unfazed by the officer’s demands. This process went on for a while until, eventually, a database made some kind of determination, and he was permitted to join the rest of us in the queue for the flight. The officers continued down the line, stopping here and there to verify documents. By now, it was clear that people with EU passports were exempt from this hazing process.
I don’t think it would suffice to conclude that this ritual was just some random show of force to demonstrate Stansted airport’s commitment to travel security. This flight was headed for a destination outside the European Union. So while, yes, I’ve seen passports checked in this part of the airport before, the work is normally done by customer service agents on behalf of the airline, not border officers. Plus, I find it hard to believe that the United Kingdom cares that deeply about quelling illegal immigration into Albania. Evidence suggests that the reverse is true1. I don’t know why it didn’t strike me at the time, but now I’m positive that this interaction was part of a chain of events in the so-called “voluntary returns” process, and that many of the people standing in line were leaving the country with instructions to never return.
Why was I there? Well, Albania has acquired a romantic character for those of us living in dull and dreary Western Europe. On TikTok, the beaches of Sarandë, the beautiful Accursed Mountains, and many more landmarks have earned the country a reputation as a cheaper alternative to Greece or Italy. Up north, you can immerse yourself in Albania’s harrowing political history at the Museum of Secret Surveillance, while in the south, you can experience the Mediterranean diet and the region’s rich cultural history. What’s more, in Sarandë, you are only a boat ride away from Corfu—making it easy to pretend you’re on a more expensive holiday. Personally, I was thrilled to be heading there.
For months I’d been slogging away at my remote internship, over-stressing about the importance of our “corporate brand”, and squabbling over social media posts with my coworkers. I had never felt so ready for a vacation. Plus, I was going with friends who knew me well, and who would make time spent away feel even better. I felt like a proper social democrat: reveling in the idea of leaving my country, lucidly aware of the aridity of my day-to-day, but content with the knowledge that so long as I didn’t linger for too long in paradise, I could rely on the State and my employer to continue supplying me with treats back home.
That being said, all I could think about on the plane was unwinding on the beach and never going back to Ireland. I was seated next to an elderly Albanian nun who made it her mission to converse with me for the entire flight. There was only one problem: she didn’t speak a word of English. I recall looking around at the families near me and thinking—were these people going on holiday too? I had hoped so, but in retrospect, I suspect that most of them were not. Now I wonder what lives they had lived. What was waiting for them at the other end?
Despite my best efforts to engage with the pious woman beside me, I didn’t come away with a solid rakia recommendation.
Borders do not scare me, but that’s because I’ve never been turned away from one. Mercifully, I am able to leave my apartment, my neighborhood, and the country I live in, thanks to the booklet I carry with me in my hand. My citizenship affords me open access to just about every country on Earth, and routinely presenting my credentials is hardly a stressful experience. But just as easily, that booklet could one day decide not to work, and suddenly I’d feel the limits of my existence. The officer would reach my position in the line and tell me, “You cannot board this plane.”
This is the situation lived every day by people all around me: the economic migrant waiting to board that flight to Tirana, the refugees fleeing war and famine in Sudan, Palestine, and Haiti, or the international students building solidarity on social media. The grisly truth is that the technologies afforded to me as a citizen of the world, and those which accelerate the process of travel (planes, TSA pre-check, electronic border gates), also serve to violently exclude people whose only sin was to be born elsewhere.
I pass through these waypoints with ease: the turnstiles, body scanners, and jet bridges. I sit idly in a series of chairs—bus chairs, train chairs, plane chairs. At no moment am I alone. The world is with me as I approach the gate. With one hand, I swipe my credit card; with the other, I raise my passport. I swipe, I walk. Swipe, walk, in a rhythmic fashion. At no point do I plan on stopping. I am always in motion. At no point am I alone, because the machinery of the world is with me—a machine powered by people in so many ways. And only some of these people are my equals. We are all encoded by data that delimits our access to things, yet we move at different speeds. Some of us must wait for years to walk through the gates; others, only as long as it takes a computer to decipher a code.
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