The line for passport applications was long and getting longer. Standing at the Everett post office, I was struck by a random thought: In one week, it would be 10 years since the Oklahoma City bombing.
OK, it wasn’t exactly a random thought.
Memories of Oklahoma City and of home-grown terrorist Timothy McVeigh come to mind. No passport would have stopped McVeigh, whose truck bomb killed 168 people. A passport also wouldn’t have stopped Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber who pleaded guilty to murder last week.
Do people favor a passport requirement for Americans returning from Canada, Mexico and other Western Hemisphere nations? I was at the post office Monday to find out. The U.S. State Department and Homeland Security Department plan to phase in passport requirements by the end of 2007.
An April 6 Associated Press article about the change included an indirect mention of Ahmed Ressam: “U.S. Customs caught a man with explosives trying to enter Washington from Canada in December 1999.”
In that case, it’s kudos to Customs, but a passport requirement would not have stopped him, either.
Ressam, arrested in Port Angeles, is Algerian. He used a doctored French passport for entry into Canada, then falsified a stolen baptismal certificate to get his Canadian passport.
The new rules would apply to citizens of Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and Caribbean countries entering the United States. Great, but would those rules stop passport thieves and counterfeiters?
Maybe it’s apples and oranges, and we’d all better get in line. It’s just a thought.
“I think it’s a good idea,” said 71-year-old Chuck Westling of Everett.
Like an estimated 80 percent of Americans, Westling has no passport. Asked if he thought the rules would hamper tourism, he said, “I think security is a more important issue.”
I couldn’t find anyone who disagreed.
“I think we should all have to have one,” said Craig Pruitt, 33, an Everett police officer. “Times have changed. Gone are the days when we could come and go. Sept. 11 saw to that.”
Pruitt was in line with his girlfriend, Jennifer White, 24. She’s been to Canada and Mexico, and wants to be ready for any vacation plans.
For some, passports could bust vacation budgets. Those I spoke with were surprised at the cost – $97 for an adult and $82 for children under 16. A new $12 “security surcharge” is included.
An adult passport is good for 10 years; children’s are valid for five years. Renewal for both types is $67. It takes six to eight weeks to get a new passport. For $60 more, you can expedite the process.
It would cost $373 to get new passports for my family. My passport, which hasn’t been used since a trip to Ireland in the 1980s, is long expired. When my husband and I were young and on a tight budget, we’d sometimes buckle the kids into our no-frills Nissan for short trips to Vancouver, B.C.
Those jaunts were rarely planned in advance. Our kids came home feeling like world travelers. Their horizons were broadened, even by day trips.
We can afford passports, but can many families? I wonder about hard-working Mexican-Americans hoping to visit kin in their homeland.
For a new passport, you and your kids must appear in person at a passport office. (To find the one closest to you, go to http://iafdb.travel.state.gov/.) You need appropriate photos, a driver’s license or government ID and proof of citizenship, usually a birth certificate.
Former Canadian citizens Ham and Ruth Moffatt of Everett are accustomed to showing their U.S. citizenship papers at the border. “I’m just used to going back and forth,” Ruth Moffatt said at the post office.
She’s used to that just as we were all used to last-minute goodbyes and first-sight embraces at airports. After Sept. 11, I wrote about the end of those cherished rites of travel.
A snazzy new terminal at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport will open in June, with restaurants and shops. Travelers will have to grab that last bite without their loved ones, who are barred by security rules from gate areas.
My 6-year-old has forgotten he ever got to see a jetliner pull up to the gate. That was the world – the America – we used to know.
There are good arguments for the passport requirement. If anything, it should make border crossings quicker.
I won’t protest the changes, likely to begin this fall after a public comment period. I will wonder, though, does a passport make me safer?
Will our passports keep bad guys out, or are we being boxed in?
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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