For many Americans, the fact that they have a shiny blue passport is what should lend them entry anywhere. As most folks know, migrants in the Americas are opting to come to the United States, not the other way around.
However, many Americans are starting to get turned away from Colombian ports of entry, like Medellin and Cartagena. This is because the US is starting to become notorious for exporting left over men or individuals with pathologies and checkered criminal pasts who seek to exploit vulnerable populations.
HSI Angel Watch
A US based program called “HSI Angel Watch Center” that aims to identify individuals listed on the sex offender registry who are traveling from the United States to other countries is regaining relevance and added use. Two high-profile cases of minor abuse, like those of Timothy Livingston and a Stefan Andres Correa, Florida man who was caught with child porn, have raised alarms around Latin America.
As a result, several men have been turned away from Medellin and Cartagena who have specific crimes related to sexual deviance and violence.
The HSI Angel Watch program serves as a warning system to alert authorities in the destination countries about the presence of these individuals. It is emphasized that this program is not exclusive to Colombia and operates on an international level. Per the Department of Homeland Security, the program has been in place since 2016 and restricted the movements of over 3500 sex offenders who need permission to travel.
Why Some Naive Passport Bros Get Taken Advantage of By Locals?
In some sense, the concept of traveling abroad to meet someone new and more aligned with a person’s values has been around for eons. However, a very strange offshoot of this general idea has emerged from online platforms that center too greatly on women’s choices and characterize men’s trials and tribulations as something more onerous than should be deemed normal for modern times. These group of men have coalesced into a peculiar social movement.
Daniel Conroy, UC Santa Barbara evolutionary psychology professor, broke down this issue in a recent Boston Globe editorial where he describes the main impetus of this movement as follows: the “passport bros,” are “a viral social media movement that advocates that men give up on American women”.
Conroy surmises that the “core of the movement is a group calling themselves “incels”, or involuntary celibates, an identity they’ve cultivated in a larger online ecosystem dubbed the ‘manosphere’.”
More importantly, he notes that at some extremes in this philosophy: “Incels have been behind horrific attacks like the Isla Vista killings, when six students were murdered and over a dozen more injured near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, 10 years ago. The perpetrator explained in a book-length manifesto that his motivation for the massacre was frustration with women who didn’t find him attractive and envy of the men they did. This year, a man in Sydney stabbed six women to death in a shopping mall. The attacker’s father suggested his motivations were similar to the Isla Vista killer’s: frustration over his failure with women.“
For certain, there is some legitimate desire to leave a political or social dynamic that is uncomfortable – people have valid desires that they should attend as they deem necessary. From what I gather, Passport Bros are not trying to engage in the social dynamics of their home country (usually, the United States) in which men often feel silenced or talked over in social media. This is legitimate for both genders, as they often feel like neither’s needs are being acknowledged. Regardless of what one’s opinion is on this classic ‘Men are from Mars, Women from Venus’ type of scenario, there is a general issue of safety and naivete that is mutual for both the men engaging in incessant travel for personal romantic relations and the countries receiving them.
In some cases, these men are naively being swayed to drop their guard just for the off chance they’ll get a whiff of a hot female – this doesn’t seem prudent. Many of them are showing up in hotel rooms, drugged, naked and robbed. In one case, a set of US based travelers was found drugged and left without their PS5. Apparently, the group had contacted women via a dating application, likely Tinder, where they were then drugged in their hotel room and cleared of their possessions. They were drugged with a sedative that the US State Department has already warned about in a travel advisory emitted earlier this year.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are American men, like Timothy Livingston, accused of heinous crimes against minors even if those minors appear to be destined for such ‘work’ by locals, unfortunately. That cycle can and should be broken by a cultural awakening on both sides; the summary of which would be “Americans commit lots of crime too; women and children in the world deserve the same respect everywhere”. In those scenarios, American predators are traveling to impoverished areas and using their somewhat (in relative terms) considerable resources to sway young and desperate people into abuse.
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