Traveling To Canada A US Passport Card Is A New Option
One thing that everyone who travels in and out of the United States needs to know about is passport rules and regulations. While the previous laws allowed US citizens to travel to border countries with nothing more than a birth certificate or driver's license, that is no longer the case. Today, a passport card applications to Canada or Mexico is necessary whenever traveling.
Prior to 2009, entering and exiting the country to border countries was pretty easy. If the traveler had a driver's license or birth certificate, they could pretty much come and go as they pleased. Circumstances have changed and travelers now need passports for destinations that never required it before.
The new 2009 law requires USA passport card for any travel outside of the U.S. This law applies to land, sea, and air travel. Although this law was implemented nearly 8 years after the September 11th attacks of 2001, many people point to 9/11 as the motivation behind the law.
According to the U.S State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, the new border laws are part of a widespread attempt to tighten border security and curb illegal immigration. Since it is often times easier to illegally enter border nations like Mexico and Canada, it would be conceivably possibly for a terrorist or otherwise unsavory character to enter a boarder nation and then cross into America with a fraudulent driver's license. Passports are more difficult than driver's licenses to counterfeit and are therefore better for security.
Although the law would seem to make perfect sense, many of the citizens on the bordering states are up in arms about the inconvenience that has been posed to them. There are outcries that it is ridiculous to have to carry a passport to Canada when we have traveled so freely in the past. These same people are not taking the time to consider that these border countries are the very means by which terrorists have previously entered our country.
The government continues to maintain that this measure is necessary to beef up our country's security. However, they have also conceded that these new measures are quite different and know that people do not respond to change very well. For that reason, there are now different types of passport documentation that can be used to make things a little more convenient.
One of the new items available to travelers is the passport card. It conveniently fits right into a regular wallet and does not have the bulk or size of a standard passport. Anyone traveling on a round trip Caribbean cruise or heading into Canada or Mexico by land can now use this instead of carrying their passport around with them all the time.
