Americans With Passports.....

When I have arguments with my friends and they are in the disparaging Americans mode, claiming how insular and out of the touch Americans are with the rest of the world, they usually come around to cite a statistic on our low levels of passport ownership as a percent of the total population. This is apparently somewhere maybe a little short of 20% of the population.

But there are some key qualifiers when comparing passport ownership. The first one is that Americans don't need passports to visit Canada and I believe to go to Mexico, but I may be wrong about that. Also, some of the Caribbean islands, if I recall correctly, do not require passports. This is in process of changing due to changes in security post-9/11 and I think that in most circumstances, returning to the USA, one will need to show a passport as an identity document.

The other issue to keep in mind, while trying to disparage Americans, is that the USA is a mighty big and diverse country by itself. One could travel all over the USA and spend years seeing and doing all the fun things that there are to do here. In many cities across the USA, one can go to various neighborhoods to delight in the cuisine of foreign lands, buy imported goods from those places and participate in festivals celebrating some ethnic heritage this-or-that. One can go to Chinatown for nearly authentic Chinese food and its not necessary to travel all the way to China to do so.

Another factor is that Americans typically get a lot fewer vacation days than their European counterparts. So traveling long distances eats into the limited holiday time.

So, really, an American only needed a passport to go to Europe, Asia, Africa or some of the more exotic South American locations and only a certain percent of travelers, due to factors such as cost, have chosen to do so. And your typical American would have to travel at least 3-5 hours by jet plane just to reach a country that requires a passport, while a traveler in Europe could fly across the whole continent in around 3 hours, spanning dozens of countries.

I, for one, despite traveling quite extensively, also catch myself watching travel oriented programming on the Discovery channel in substitute for doing the real thing. Maybe that is a function of age as I live vicariously through those young people on the Lonely Planet show backpacking through exotic locales. And watching it on TV is also a whole lot cheaper.

I suppose that a comparison with the percent of Australians that are current passport holders would be more appropriate due to the distances to a sovereign passport demanding country, but I cannot find the data. In any case, I am sure that the percent of Australian passport holders is likely to be higher than Americans anyway. You find Australians all over the place! I once took the Teleferico [cablecar] from Merida, Venezuela up to the peak of some freezing cold, oxygen deprived, headache creating Andean mountains and ran into a group of Australians that morning on a multi-month holiday in South America. I was quite impressed by the adventurousness of the people.

Despite all the hoopla on Americans holding less passports than others, outbound travel by Americans totaled 56 million in 2003. This is a fairly large number. International travel excluding Canada and Mexico was still a fairly decent 24+ million travelers.