Proportion of Americans with passports soars

I’d long been mildly boggled that the proportion of Americans with passports is so low. It turns out in the last few years my degree of boggling should have been recalibrated:

The post 9/11 switch to requiring passports to cross the borders with Canada or Mexico looks to have caused a large part of this growth – and also means that the old, boggling figures were perhaps not quite what they seemed given that it was possible to travel abroad to two such popular locations without a passport.

The US may not have passports as good as the Finnish, but they do have rather more passports than popular lore (used to) say.