Originally Posted by
cordelli
Maybe a portion of it, but certainly not most of it. The increase uptrend started was well on it's way before Americans needed passports to return from Canada and Mexico (2007 air, 2009 land)
And the number of valid passports has been rising for decades
I am rather confident that the bulk of the passport-issuance increase are due to: US citizens being told -- for some years before 2007 -- that a passport was going to be necessary and/or make things a lot easier for crossing into the US even for intra-North America+Caribbean travel; and the rapidly growing proportion of US citizens with at least one foreign-born parent (many of which got US passports as evidence of citizenship as a response to anxiety that their origins or that of their children would be questioned).