When Borders Mean Freedom for Some, Survival for Others

The visa rejection letter arrived on the same day I read about the refugee boat that capsized off the Greek coast. Forty-seven people drowned trying to reach the same shores I’d casually planned to visit for vacation.

I crumpled the letter—frustrated at the bureaucracy, the requirements, the assumption that I might not return home. But the newspaper photograph wouldn’t leave my mind: a child’s shoe washed up on a beach where tourists take selfies at sunset.

This is the mathematics of privilege: my disappointment versus their desperation. My inconvenience versus their impossibility.

I can be frustrated by visa requirements because I have the luxury of frustration. For me, travel is desire. For millions of others, movement is survival, and the same borders that mildly inconvenience me become walls between life and death.

The weight of this recognition sits in my chest like a stone. How do I process the randomness of being born here instead of there? Of carrying a passport that opens some doors while others carry documents that close every door they approach?

Happy and I sometimes lie awake talking about this. How we want to see the world but recognize that our wanting is a privilege others pay for with everything they own. She says something that stops me: “Maybe being aware of our privilege means we travel differently. More carefully. More gratefully.”

But awareness doesn’t eliminate the contradiction. I still want to see the Northern Lights, to walk through European museums, to experience landscapes that exist only in my imagination. Does acknowledging my privilege make these desires more or less valid?

I think about the complexity of movement in our world. The same airplane that carries tourists to Instagram-worthy destinations also carries refugees to safety—if they’re fortunate enough to get legal passage. The same oceans that offer romantic cruises become graveyards for people fleeing war.

There’s a man in our neighborhood who walked for three months to reach this country. Not for vacation or adventure or self-discovery, but because staying meant death. He tells me about the friends he lost along the way, about children who didn’t make it to the border, about the particular exhaustion of carrying everything you own on your back while your homeland burns behind you.

His stories make my travel desires feel small and selfish. But then I realize: feeling guilt about my privilege doesn’t help anyone. The question isn’t whether I deserve to travel when others can’t. The question is what I do with the awareness of this inequality.

Maybe the answer isn’t to stop wanting to see the world. Maybe it’s to see it more clearly—to understand that every border, every visa requirement, every passport control represents someone’s freedom and someone else’s imprisonment.

When I do travel, I want to carry the weight of this knowledge with me. I want to remember that the landscapes I choose to visit, others are forced to flee. That my tourist dollars exist in the same economy that funds the walls that keep desperate families separated.

And maybe, in some small way, being conscious of this paradox makes my movement through the world a form of witness—an acknowledgment that travel is never just personal, never just about individual experience, but always part of a larger story about who gets to move freely and who doesn’t.

The next time I apply for a visa, I’ll think of the shoe on the beach. Not to feel guilty, but to feel grateful. And maybe that gratitude will change how I walk through whatever doors happen to open for me.