U. S. Expats Are Revealing The "We're Being Scammed" Realizations They Had After Moving Abroad

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7. I recall writer/historian Morris Berman mentioning how US passports...

...were rarely held by many Americans until after 9/11, when a lot of travel laws and policies changed. Until 2002, the number of Americans with a passport was something like 15%. Since then, those numbers have increased quite a bit, though I wonder how many in the population have just a passport card (an ID acceptable for domestic travel) vs. a full passport book (required for international travel).

Americans historically didn't carry passports because they seldom if ever left the country. The real question is, do Americans not travel outside the US because they aren't interested in doing so, or rather is it because our increasingly precarious employment and shrinking benefits make it nearly impossible for the average citizen to travel internationally? Berman felt that the latter situation was much more likely. (He emigrated to Mexico in 2006).