Originally Posted by
RobertS975
The whole passport thing is a bit of beaurocracy at its finest. I mean one can cross borders by land all over Europe without so much as anyone even stopping you.
And what is so magical about an expired passport? It just means you didn't pay your $$$ to your government. Do you suddenly cease to exist if your passport is expired?
For domestic travel in the US, I think acceptability of expired ID's should be more flexible for two simple reasons: 1) it's not actually required with secondary screening, and 2) there are no foreign laws involved,
which an airline worker doesn't have the authority to waive anyways.
But for international travel, I think that there are plenty of good reasons that passports
should expire. As someone familiar with consular work, the potential for passport/visa fraud -- already a booming business the world over -- would increase even more significantly if valid PPTs never expired. The second-hand market in stolen or exploited PPTs, especially with previously issued visas, would be extremely lucrative. 10 year validity (at least for US passports) seems like a pretty workable compromise between valid security issues and potential renewal hassle for any individual traveler.
Originally Posted by
RobertS975
And visas are another way of extracting $$$ from the traveler.
Originally Posted by
Phudnik
In some cases, literally so. For example, Turkey requires a visa fee that varies by country according to what each country charges Turks.
In general, all countries charge foreigners the same amount for a visa and/or visa application that their citizens are charged by that country. It's a well established principal of diplomatic/consular relations called reciprocity.
Turkey is actually an exception to this reciprocity system, at least for US citizens -- the last time I went there (Sept '06), a 3 month tourist visa at the airport was 20USD. On the other hand, a Turkish citizen applying for a US visa would have to pay a $131 application fee (aka MRV - 'Machine Readable Visa'), though the actual visa would be issued for free once the application was approved.