The whole "Americans don't have passports" thing always cracks me up.

We're the fourth largest country on the planet by area, with the first two being Russia and Canada. Russia and Canada are both largely unpopulated, or very sparsely populated, with the vast majority of people living in around 20%-30% of that area. Sure, US also has plenty of low population areas, but it's not nearly as much as the others. Even China, the third largest, has more areas that aren't really inhabited, from what I can tell. Furthermore, the US has much more people than Russia or Canada, meaning you're going to have more populated places.

So America may very well be the largest country geographically when you take populated areas into account, depending on how all that is broken down and measured. At least second. We also have a bunch of geographical diversity, as well as diversity of states.

Point is, we're not Europe, a collection of often tiny countries. Americans could (and I'm not saying they do) travel more without a passport than Europeans generally do with a passport. Also, we can go to Hawaii, Alaska, and outlying territorial islands without need of a passport as well.

Americans simply don't need passports in the same way Europeans often do.

EDIT: For those curious, it's a bit hard to measure, but I believe USA is third in amount of populated area, after India and China. India isn't as big as the US, but is packing such a massive amount of people in there they populate a lot of the area. Similar with China; already larger in area, and with a lot more people to fit. USA is almost as big as all of Europe. Bigger, if you exclude Russia.

The whole "Americans don't have passports" thing always cracks me up.

We're the fourth largest country on the planet by area, with the first two being Russia and Canada. Russia and Canada are both largely unpopulated, or very sparsely populated, with the vast majority of people living in around 20%-30% of that area. Sure, US also has plenty of low population areas, but it's not nearly as much as the others. Even China, the third largest, has more areas that aren't really inhabited, from what I can tell. Furthermore, the US has much more people than Russia or Canada, meaning you're going to have more populated places.

So America may very well be the largest country geographically when you take populated areas into account, depending on how all that is broken down and measured. At least second. We also have a bunch of geographical diversity, as well as diversity of states.

Point is, we're not Europe, a collection of often tiny countries. Americans could (and I'm not saying they do) travel more without a passport than Europeans generally do with a passport. Also, we can go to Hawaii, Alaska, and outlying territorial islands without need of a passport as well.

Americans simply don't need passports in the same way Europeans often do.