Papers, Please

Identity, borders and the right to belong.

Every border is also a filing system. Whether you can cross it, stay behind it or return to it depends less on the guard in the booth than on a record held somewhere else — a citizenship register, a visa database, an entry in a file you have never seen.

This series follows people who ran into that filing system: families stripped of nationality, refugees sold journeys that did not exist, travellers whose personal data became the fee for convenience. Two further articles are in preparation and will be added here when they are published.

Read the series

1. Deprivation of nationality in the Gulf: Stories from Kuwait and Bahrain
   July 20, 2026 — What it does to a family when a state withdraws the document that proves they exist.
2. Tickets to nowhere: Haitian refugees fall prey to travel scams
   July 26, 2026 — When the only route out of a country is sold by people with no intention of delivering it.
3. The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel
   July 22, 2026 — The price of easier travel, paid in personal data rather than money.

The series continues

New articles are added to this series as they are published. You can also follow the full Papers, Please archive, or browse all our series.