I’m a bit surprised - I thought if you guys went to all the trouble with getting a passport, you would want to make it secure, non-easily counterfeitable. The entry on the English wiki looks as if the information is simply printed on the paper of the booklet itself.
But if every regional passport facility has the printing equipment - doesn’T that cost an awful lot of money? I thought Americans hardly need passports at all, since there’s not a lot of travel outside, and you don’t have national IDs, but only those easily fakeable drivers ID (for which there is apparently a huge black market in order to buy drinks - really, I don’t understand the mindset behind your security setup with all the terrorism theater). So how full are all those regional offices all the time?
Shibboleth, don’t forget that this is EU standard. We don’t want people to fake passports or IDs, and we want to rely on other Europeans to have the same high standard, too. (Although I still see Italians with paper IDs! )
I have a last minute job opportunity in Vancouver that needs me to fly up early next week.
I mentioned my predicament to a friend, and he recommended a passport service nearby that helps you with the paperwork then basically waits in line for you. It’s a little costly, but they’ve guaranteed that they’ll have my passport ready by Monday afternoon. I would have waited in line (cause I’m cheap) but the guy I’m working for said he would reimburse me for any expedited passport costs (yay).
As far as I can tell from looking at pics and info, our passports have very similar, if not identical security features as yours. Holograms, RFID, weird lamination, etc. etc.
That’s right. Americans hardly ever go anywhere which makes it strange that people in so many countries, including European ones, always bitch about all those fat Americans walking around in sweat pants and sponge rollers in their hair.
Seriously, most Americans don’t travel outside the country because it is really big and there is a lot to do and see here but about 30% do have passports. That still adds up to an awful lot of people that needs passports renewed and there aren’t that many regional offices with the printing equipment to make them so it isn’t cost prohibitive. They just offer walk-in services because some people really do need it. Most people just mail in their application.
I got my passport same-day at the Boston regional office but it took a few hours. American passports can be faked but they aren’t flimsy or primitive. They have all kinds of special marks on them even if they are mostly laminated paper with a plastic cover. You can’t get a passport with just a driver’s license either. You need at least a birth certificate. Those can be faked as well but so can everything else if you want to badly enough.
I’m a bit floored, too - it sounds like you guys get your whole passport done in the time it takes us to wait in line just to start the process. Damn you, socialism!
Cat Whisperer, my experience was that to get the US passport on an expedited basis, you had to show that you needed it to travel within a very short time, and you paid an extra fee. If you couldn’t show that you definitely needed it in a short period (e.g. - by showing you had already purchased a plane ticket to travel out of the U.S., leaving in the next week), you weren’t eligible for the expedited process. The wait times for the non-expedited passports were about the same as here in Canada. As well, the expedited process is only available if you go to one of the regional US passport offices - there’s only about 10 of those in the U.S., located in major centres like L.A. and New York.
I don’t know if we have a similar expedited process here in Canada.
constanze, one day, if we keep trying, us poor, unenlightened Americans can be as intelligent and unsophisticated as you Europeans. And then we can wait for months on end to get our passports, too.
Kyla, while Shagnasty’s number is low percentagewise, it’s still many people numberwise, I realize that. I’m still surprised it’s even 30%, given how often people say that they don’t need to travel outside the US because it’s so big. And of course, the cost of a flight ticket from the US to outside is much more expensive than going by car or train to a neighbouring European country, so that’s a second factor for less travel outside.
Although, with the Schengen treaty, which got rid of the Intra-European border controls and eased border passings, we have far less need for a passport than before, because now the national ID is enough to cross the neighboring borders. So although I had a provisional children’s passport before age 16, I haven’t renewed my passport when it ran out several years ago, because it cost too much and I hadn’t used it after traveling to the US.
Shagnasty,
if all you need is birth certificate, I suppose the passport centers are now online and check in a central registry to make sure you don’t use the old trick from fakers back until the 80s, where you went to the record hall and found a child that had died a few years old, and then got a copy of its birthcertificate, because death was recorded on paper in a seperate file, so the legitimate birth certificate could be used to get a legal drivers ID.
In Germany, the citizens offices have records of place of residence which they check when processing the application. But in the US people don’t have to register. So how do you prevent people from going into different offices and getting different passports with one valid birth certificate? Was all this updated after 9/11?
You say
but from the above descriptions, it sounded as if there is at least one regional office in each state, possibly more. So how many are there? Do the small states on the East Coast share one center, or does each of the 50 states have at least one?
I think it must be the same in the US as it is in Canada - things like passports would be tied to our social insurance number (social security number in the US), like our taxes and pensions and stuff. This is me WAG’ing, though, so take it for what it’s worth.
There are 19 Passport Agencies. Not every state has one.
As you can see, there are strict requirements for applying in person at a Passport Agency. Most people apply by mail. There is by-mail Expedited Processing, which takes 2-3 weeks vs. Standard Processing in 4-6 weeks.
FWIW, I had to apply for a new passport last year. I went for Standard Processing, and it took about 2 weeks, maybe less. I was shocked (in a good way).
constanze, I suspect they have a computerized record of all of the valid passports currently issued, which prevents people from getting as many as they want. Although you can actually have multiple valid passports. I used to have two valid passports. (One was my Peace Corps passport. It looked exactly like a regular passport, but on the last page it said “Bearer is a Peace Corps Volunteer”. It became invalid a month after my Peace Corps service ended.) You can also get a second valid passport if you have stamps from one country that will prevent you from visiting another country (ie, if you have Israeli stamps and want to go to Syria).
Also, you have to realize that going in person like this is not the typical way of acquiring a passport. Going in person to an agency is really only used when you have an emergency, like the OP had. Most everyone else just applies via mail.
To the best of my recollection, no; Social Insurance Numbers (SINs) are not collected from Canadian passport applicants. SINs are tightly regulated, and generally must be given only to those organizations from which a person collects income: employers (work income), banks (interest payments), investment houses (capital gains and losses), and similar. We don’t use the SIN as a form of ID, and we can refuse to supply it if it will not be used for income-reporting purposes. Since a passport is a form of ID that is not used for income-reporting, no SIN need be reported to the Passport Office.
