Nope, just a regular Joe on a ski vacation, lost passport between checking in at the Zurich airport and boarding my connecting flight in Frankfurt two years ago. There’s a Homeland Security rep in Frankfurt who pulled up an image of my passport on his phone and walked me through security and on to the plane. Apparently he spends a good part of his day doing that.
I have flown out of Switzerland a number of times and my passport was always checked. I have left by train and it wasn’t, but going only to an EC country (mostly France). And they do check coming back, although it was perfunctory.
I don’t recall all the details of the law in this area, but there’s a general principle that the United States (and I assume most other civilized countries) cannot bar entry of their citizens for lack of a passport. Consulates issue temporary passports to minimize the hassle involved, but if you were abducted and stripped of all possessions, and sought reentry to the US, you could not be refused simply on the basis of not having a passport.
Now, try traveling from the US to the Schengen Area without a passport. That would be a feat.
Tangent: seaman were another class of people who traditionally did not need passports. Just their ships papers.
Now, ships only stop in port for part of a day while containers are loaded/unloaded. But back in the day, the sailors would land in port, walk up the road to the port district, and have a couple of weeks while the longshoremen loaded and unloaded.
Another tangent, regarding US passports: not only did we have to provide photographs, we had to provide photographs printed using an approved process. Of which there were only 2 approved suppliers in Melbourne. I don’t know if those photographers were printing themselves, or if the they were just certifying that they used the correct archival printing from a commercial lab: in any case the standard process was not approved.
So you did have a passport. You just didn’t have it with you. That was a surmountable problem because the existence and details of your passport could be verified using the wonderful magic that is the internet today.
Could you get a passport with just fingerprints on it maybe?
:)
- thanks for making my day with that joke. As advised, I did not believe your post.
Same as the filthy rich person in the story. Except they could eventually put their hands on their passport, I couldn’t. They just weren’t asked for it.
As to the right of a US citizen to enter the US, that’s generally true. However, as I understand it that only works if you’re at the US border. There’s no right to be put on a plane in Germany and in fact most people have to go the consulate in Frankfurt and be issued a new passport before they are allowed on a plane. As it was, the airline (Luftansa) wouldn’t allow me on board until the guy from Homeland Security signed off on it.
As Melbourne said, US merchant Marines did not need a passport. I don’t know about now, but I never needed one during my career except for a 4 month stint working for the Military Sealift Command during Operation Desert Shield and one day into Operation Desert Storm. (I was able to watch the war from home on TV.) I even got a Campaign Medal for that, but had to pay for it.
During that civilian contract with the military, I was required to have a passport and they arranged for me to get one the next day in Boston.
I had to drive 100 miles for that and nobody ever even looked at it in Spain, Germany, United Arab Emirates or Egypt.
In most places I just walked off the ship and hailed a taxi to the nearest bar.
But there’s a difference. In your case steps were taken to verify that you did, in fact, have a passport before you could get on a plane. In the filthy rich person story, no such steps were taken at any point and (if we believe the story) she could have travelled even if, in reality, she did not have a passport.
In general there’s no law that says you have to have a passport to get on a plane (or to leave a country). But there’s a practical problem; airlines who fly you to the US (and many other countries) are fined if, on arrival in the US, you are refused admission. So, in their own interests, they are reluctant to let you on the plane unless they verify that you have a passport (and the relevant visa, if required), or they get some kind of clearance from immigration authorities (which was the role of the Homeland Security guy in Frankfurt in your case; he didn’t just verify that you had a passport; he also cleared your way with the airline).
But was that the Swiss authorities doing the check, or the airline? Airlines will check because they don’t want to be stuck transporting you back if you can’t get in where you’re going. But the Swiss government doesn’t care if you have a passport or not when you leave. I’ve also traveled a lot to/from Switzerland, and that’s been by my experience with most European countries. By comparison, some Asian countries like Singapore require an actual exit stamp before they’ll even let you in the international terminal.
Switzerland is in the Schengen area, which has exit controls (with exit stamps) for people boarding flights to non-Schengen countries.
Depends on your nationality. EU citizens, even of non-Schengen countries, do not get exit stamps. Also certain permanent residents of EU countries.
They do, of course, have to establish their citizenship/residence status, but this doesn’t necessarily require a passport. It can be done with a national identity card
The legitimacy of a passport is decided by the immigration officer that it is presented to at a port of entry. In most countries, they have wide discretion, and are not even obliged to admit a traveler who has a visa, if they deem the visa to be deficient or invalid for any reason.
So your country can go ahead and issue you a passport with no photo, according to its own policy, but you’re not getting into Uzbekistan if the immigration officer says he wants to see a passport with your photo in it that meets his specifications. You’ll be put on the next plane out of the country, and the airline that flew you in is responsible for your ticket. For that reason, if you show up at the Istanbul airport for a flight to Uzbekistan, and you have a passport with no picture, there is a good chance you will not be allowed to board the flight at the departure gate…
The mere fact that you have a book that purports to be a passport is not by itself an inalienable pass to go wherever you please.
Wouldn’t that apply only if they’re traveling as a head of state, and depend on their own country’s laws as well as on those of the countries being visited?
The King of Spain has one (as well as National ID and a driving license), but I don’t know if it’s because our law doesn’t have a specific exception for the head of state (F VI having made it quite clear that he knows the law is above him and is perfectly fine with that), or because not all of his travel abroad is as a head of state. In our case it is Spain who makes the request to “let this person pass”, not whomever is in charge at the time.
Yup. The short reason why the English Queen doesn’t have a passport is that she has never applied for one, presumably because she has not been in a situation where she has had any practical need for one.
If she did apply for one, it would presumably be granted. She is a British citizen, after all. No British citizen has a passport until they apply for one but, when they do, there are limited grounds on which they can be refused, and I can’t off-hand think of any obvious basis for refusing the Queen’s application.
And, to nitpick some earlier claims, the UK passport doesn’t actually contain a request by the Queen to let the bearer pass; it contains a request from the Secretary of State, in the Queen’s name, to let the bearer pass. And Secretaries of State, of course, have passports.
Tenn. was one of the last states to put a picture on drivers license , this was around 82. A woman said her religion did not allow her picture to be taken and she went to court. I don’t know if she won the case.
I checked my passport and you’re right - I do have exit stamps from Switzerland. Not sure why I didn’t remember that. Must have been tired after all the hiking.
I recall similar cases regarding drivers’ licenses in Ontario and Quebec - the persons did not want to remove their veils for a license photo as it was “against their religion”. IIRC they lost their case.
Which brings up the obvious question - what’s on Saudi women’s passports? (and now, drivers licenses…)
Had an ex-brother in law who was working at the US embassy in Saudi doing visas for US entry. Some fairly high ranking woman from the royal family wanted to go to the US. Presented a passport with a picture of her in a vail. He didn’t accept it, and refused to issue the visa.
She came back with a passport with a picture of her face, and he was briefly allowed to see her unveiled to check against the photo. He was rather smug about it when telling the story.