A passport is an official travel document issued by a nation to its citizens. Passports are generally required for travel outside one's home country, though in certain cases, countries with close geographical or political ties may not require passports of certain travelers. A U.S. passport contains basic identifying information about an individual and additional travel information such as immigration stamps and visas.
Basic Information
Passports contain basic identifying information, including surname and given names, date of birth, type of document, document code, nationality, place of birth, sex, date of passport issuance and the passport expiration date. Often a passport's date of expiration must be several weeks or even months after the expended return date from a foreign country; countries want to ensure that they do not have people staying in them with invalid passports.
Photos
As with a driver's license, a passport is an official form of photo identification. A picture must be included with a passport application that is copied next to the basic information cited in section one. A good, clean photograph is important, since immigration officers and other officials are likely to check the passport picture to visually match it up with the traveler. Sometimes additional passport photos are required by certain countries; these are stapled to immigration and customs pages in the passport.
Security Measures
U.S. passports contain a variety of security measures to prevent copies and forgeries. The security measures used are similar to those used in other forms of identification of paper bills, such as intricate background patterns, watermarks and holographic images and seals. The material of the passport itself is also not standard paper, but more like cloth, and the information pages are laminated.
Visas
When traveling to certain foreign countries, an additional permission from those countries' consulates or embassies may be required to gain permission to travel. These official stamps or stickers are called visas, and are usually placed on one of the appropriate pages of the passport. Visas usually have a set duration that allows the traveler to stay in the foreign nation for a certain period of time before having to leave or renew the visa.
Immigration and Customs Stamps
Another important set of information contained in a U.S. passport is a log of all the places a person has passed through immigration and customs. Passports contain several pages dedicated to official arrivals and departures from foreign nations. The stamps cite the date and place the person arrived in or departed from the nation, which helps immigration officers keep track of travelers and look into suspicious travel history.