Obtaining a U.S. passport

A passport is documentation of your status while traveling abroad in another country. This is to get you through customs when you enter or exit the countries. You can apply for your passport at any given time if this is your first time applying for a passport. You’re advised to apply for your passport at least 90 days before your scheduled travel date, and that’s because you need to give yourself as much time in advance to go through the application process and to get a recent photo made to accompany the application since immigration doesn’t take photos for passports you have to get one made by one of those small photo booths or at a drug store like CVS or Walgreens who charge about $5-8 for a set of 5 ID sized pictures.

You can apply for a passport either through the post office, county courthouse, public libraries, city or village halls, State and other government municipal offices. In recent events there have been major delays of processing application for first timers and renewals of passports. The state department estimated that applications for renewal and first time passports has gone up from 12.1 million in 2006 to 18 million in 2007, and from the normal 6 week processing period the wait could go as long as 12 weeks. The delay is due in part from a new law that went into effect in January requiring those who traveled abroad to Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, and Bermuda to produce a passport upon re-entry into the United States.

According to news reports that in early 2008 it will be required to show a passport when re-entering the United States from Canada and Mexico by land and the Caribbean by ship. In the recent months that the passport application processing time was down from 12 to 10 weeks and was working to get the turn over time back to the standard 6 week waiting period. This new law was to enforce better security when people entered the country from foreign lands. Those who did apply for passports didn’t have immediate travel plans versus those who were traveling within a specific amount of time when they got their passports in the mail. Homeland security had stated that this was aimed to better monitor who enters and exits the country and to verify the identities of those who come in and out of the country through air, land, and sea ports of entry into the United States.

Some attribute the surge in passport applications because of the fear of terrorism and a backlog of having hired nearly 3000 more employees in the past 3 years to the State Department to handle the demand of applications for passports and other matters within the department. Politicians have gone on record and said that their offices were flooded with calls from angry citizens to why they haven’t been able to get their passports in a timely manner, yet they couldn’t do anything about it because it was out of their jurisdiction when this was an issue that was to be directed to the local state department office so the individual(s) can get the appropriate response to their questions and inquiries to why there’s a huge delay in getting the passports that were applied for or renewed to be returned. The State department is working towards getting the return rate on passports back on track so people can get on with their travel plans and not have any further delay in getting their passports returned as a first time applicant or renewal. Eventually this problem will improve with time so backlogs like this won’t happen again.