Modern passport systems leave little room for bureaucratic heroism
The history of the 20th century, and especially the history of the Holocaust, is replete with bureaucratic heroes like Raoul Wallenberg, Chiune Sugihara, Frank Foley, and Aristides de Sousa Mendes, diplomats who combined to save hundreds of thousands of lives by bending the rules and issuing unauthorized passports or visas to people fleeing persecution. Now, in the 21st century, as we stand ever closer to repeating the horrors of the past century, these rule-bending insiders are nowhere to be found. It isn't that people aren't capable of morally taking a stand. It's that they physically can't do so.
I would know, because I once tried. As a midlevel visa manager at the U.S. Consulate-General in Mumbai in 2022, I tried to help an Afghan family marooned by the Taliban takeover. The parents already had U.S. visas, but when I tried to issue a visa to their baby, a computer overrode my decision. To this day, I don't know what happened to that family. These kinds of scenes are repeating around the world, from the closed-up Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt to U.S. deportation proceedings that end in shipment to Salvadoran prisons. Photographs of emaciated people peering through gates are once again becoming common—and their fate is increasingly controlled by faceless systems.
Ironically, the modern immigration system was designed to prevent the repetition of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. Implicit in the hopes of the founders of refugee aid societies and the legislators who wrote immigration law was that the 20th century's mass displacement and mass murder could be made impossible via international cooperation and the codification of human rights. The much more anodyne charters of functional international organizations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) also carried the assumption that making things systematized and efficient was the way to do that.
Years ago, in my diplomatic training, State Department instructors sat us down and somberly told us about what Wallenberg did in Hungary. The day might come when we have to choose between our values and the rules, they said. The stories of Sugihara, Foley, Sousa Mendes, and others are also famous in migration management circles, held up as exemplars because they were noble people who did the right thing when it mattered. How many times does a bureaucrat stamping visas get to become a moral hero?
The Diplomats Who Went Rogue
Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat in Budapest who pushed procedure to the limit. In the bygone days of Hungary's fascist regime, Wallenberg was creative with his embassy budget: He rented dozens of buildings around the city, declared these buildings Swedish diplomatic facilities with full diplomatic immunity, and sheltered thousands of Hungarian Jews inside. These were people who, absent Wallenberg's absurdist rule bending and personal initiative, would have been rounded up and sent to concentration camps in a matter of days.
As an Imperial Japanese diplomatic official during World War II, Sugihara makes for an odd hero. But when he found himself in charge of visa issuance at the Japanese consulate in Lithuania, at the time occupied by the Soviet Union, he saw no harm in bending the rules to help people. Sugihara started signing transit visas (permission to travel to and pass through Japan) for basically anyone who needed to flee Lithuania. He didn't check for onward tickets or financial means. He just stamped the passports and filled out what he had to. At first, Sugihara mostly gave these visas to middle-class businessmen and Jewish yeshiva students fleeing the Soviets, but then he gave them to anybody fleeing the Nazis. This allowed thousands of Lithuanian Jews to make their way from Japan to any country that would take them. As German troops closed in, Sugihara worked tirelessly to issue as many as he could, sometimes working for 18 hours a day. On his way out of the country, Sugihara kept filling out visas until the last possible moment, tossing his final signed and stamped passports out of the train window.
Foley was a British passport control officer in Berlin in the late 1930s who individually saved thousands of German Jews by issuing British visas in Berlin to anybody who needed them before the war even started. Nobody knew it at the time, but Foley was actually a British spy and was only given immigration responsibilities as busywork to cover his identity. That cover story ended up mattering more, for more people, than any spying he ever did.
Sousa Mendes was an aristocratic Portuguese diplomat serving as the consul-general in Bordeaux during the fall of France. In the midst of the general European refugee crisis, the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar issued Circular 14, an order that directed Portuguese consulates to restrict visa issuance...