The government’s new visa system doesn’t welcome the diaspora—it monetizes their return.

September 25,2025

At the gleaming terminals of Heathrow, JFK, and Frankfurt, a new ritual of rejection unfolds. Somali travelers arrive, clutching hard-won passports from distant nations—some are worn leather testaments to stateless survival; others, fresh plastic tokens of a state supposedly reborn. Their reward for this journey home is bureaucratic whiplash: “Double Visa Required. Pay, or turn back.”

These are the diaspora Somalis—the very people who fled the ruins of civil war, who funded schools in Puntland, built hospitals in Somaliland, and whose remittances have long served as the nation’s de facto life support. Now, their own government greets them with a surcharge on their identity. The recent launch of the federal E-Visa system, demanding payment from all foreigners, deliberately ignores the unique status of the diaspora, treating them not as sons and daughters of the soil, but as revenue streams.

The irony is profound. A generation ago, the military regime of Siad Barre sowed the seeds of conflict by denying travel rights to citizens from the north. Today, a government in Mogadishu, whose authority barely extends beyond its own capital, asserts the power to tax the diaspora’s return to regions like Puntland and Somaliland—effectively demanding a fee for the right to visit their family homes. This is not federalism; it is a shakedown enabled by software. Why collect one fee when the architecture of a fractured state allows for two?

They call this “modernization.” But behind the glossy interface lies an extraction scheme with the ingenuity of a cartel and the empathy of a pickpocket. This is not digitization; it is the monetization of longing.

This policy is not governance; it is humiliation masquerading as administration. The diaspora is left to wonder: What was the sacrifice for, if the “rebuilt” homeland greets them not with open arms, but with an online payment portal?

Somalia’s E-Visa is not a travel document. It is a satirical masterpiece—a ticket to nowhere, embossed with a state seal. It teaches a final, brutal lesson: that the most intimate predation often comes from the hand that claims to hold your own passport.