Should you want to obtain a passport from Singapore, consider it a smart move. It may the ‘most free’ country you’re going to deal with for many years…
A passport originating from the Southeast Asian nation is officially deemed the most influential globally, as reported in the most recent Henley Passport Index released last week.
The index reveals that holders of a Singaporean passport can visit 192 out of a total of 227 global travel destinations visa-free.
That is correct. You do not need a visa.
With this designation by the Index, Singapore has overtaken Japan, which held the top spot in the index for the preceding five years.
The United States has Become a Lot Less Free ‘Passport-Wise’ in the Last Decade
The U.S. slipped noticeably in the index, descending one position from the previous year to stand in eighth place, sharing its rank with Lithuania, with visa-free access to 184 global travel destinations.
Both the U.S. and the United Kingdom have been witnessing a consistent decline since 2014, a year when their passports were considered once the world’s most powerful.
Henley & Partners noted that over the past decade, the U.S. expanded the number of visa-free destinations for its citizens by only 12. However, this increase is the least significant among all nations listed in the top 10 of the index.
The Henley Passport Index is a global ranking of countries based on the travel freedom that their citizens enjoy. This is typically determined by the number of countries that passport holders can enter either without a visa or with visa-on-arrival.
This index is produced by Henley & Partners, a global citizenship and residence advisory firm, in partnership with the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which maintains the world’s largest and most accurate database of travel information.
One could surmise that the Pandemic has changed a lot of the passport statistics in the wrong direction due to the lockdowns.
Now, we could be seeing a sort of ‘you can’t put the jeanie back in the bottle’ trends going forward…or backward we should say.
Translation: Why would governments want to ‘make things more free’?
Well, of course they would want to do that.
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Right?
