Thoughts ?
Weird that only 3% of Americans had a passport 25 years ago.
Borders are much tighter now than they were 25 years ago. The first few times I went to Canada and Mexico as a child no passport was required. Daddy and Mama would show their driver's licenses. The children just sat in the back seat and smiled. Sometimes, grownups didn't even need a license. I remember when Mama forgot hers one time and it was okay. Also, people could go to Jamaica, Bermuda, Bahamas--come on pretty Mama--without a passport. Nowadays you need a passport to visit those places.
Also, we're a more mobile people now than when I was a child. I got my first passport when I was 7 years old, in 1974. I needed that one to travel to Germany because my father was going to be working there for a year. My son got his first passport when he was 4 years old. He needed it to travel to China. I wouldn't be surprised if it is not at all uncommon for someone of my son's generation to get a passport three years younger than someone of my generation. Of course for places like China and Germany, a passport was always necessary, but this also suggests something about how our economic dependencies have shifted since I was a child. My son is now 9 and has flown across the Pacific ocean several times, but has never flown across the Atlantic. By the time I was nine years old we had flown across the Atlantic multiple times but not across the Pacific.
In 1979, I rode with a busload of other college students from MN to see a total eclipse in Winnipeg. At the border there was a short discussion between the driver and the border agent, and then the one Canadian had to come out to produce ID. No one else mattered.
In the early 80's I was in grad school in MA and occasionally caught a ride to the Midwest. The US had a national 55 mph speed limit, while Ontario highways permitted 100 km/h which is over 62 mph. So, when I shared a ride from Boston to Chicago, the fastest path was to cut across Ontario from Niagara Falls to Port Huron. There was no check of anything at the border, just a question asking if we were all Americans.
However, when I married in 1988 we had a European honeymoon. I can attest that my wife and I were among that 3% with passports in 1989. We used them frequently since we crossed borders between Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and Yugoslavia. Hotels required us to show them when we checked in.
