Pews vs. Passports: Who’s Leaving the Country — and Who Isn’t
(ANALYSIS) Here’s a stat that, to this day, I still can’t quite believe: the share of Americans who had a passport was 5% in 1990. According to data from 2023, that had risen to 48%.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a small town in rural southern Illinois and have lived in this part of the country my entire life, but there’s just no way I believe that half of Americans have a passport.
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d bet 30% of folks living within 50 miles of my house have a passport. Honestly, that’s probably overly optimistic. But the sparsely populated Midwest is certainly not indicative of how much traveling happens in places like New York City or Seattle.
This is what I love about data, by the way: it forces us outside our own bubble and reminds us that our immediate surroundings don’t represent the entire country.
I’m telling you all this to preface a really fun survey question from Pew’s American Trends Panel, Wave 124, hosted by the Association of Religion Data Archives. It’s a pretty simple one: “How many countries have you traveled to outside the United States?”
The response options ranged from none to 10 or more. Here’s how the entire sample answered that question compared to the five religious traditions in the data.
Well, this data really does dovetail with that information from the State Department about the share of Americans with passports. Among those who took the survey, just 23% said they had never visited a foreign country.
In total, 41% of Americans had visited no more than one country outside the United States. On the other hand, 27% had visited at least five countries. That’s quite a large share of Americans who have traveled extensively.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.