The United States issued a record number of passports and visas in fiscal year 2024, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced.
"The two of us are united in making sure that, again, more people can come to this country, more Americans can travel the world," Blinken said during an appearance with Raimondo at the State Department on Tuesday.
"That's good for America; it's good for the world," he added.
Blinken said 24.5 million passports, which he called "that little blue book that's their ticket to the world," were issued in fiscal year 2024 which ended on Sept. 30. - 500,000 more than the year before.
The U.S. also issued 11.5 million visas during that period, "breaking all previous records," he said.
Of those, 8.5 million were visitor visas, a 10% increase over the previous year.
Blinken said the wait time for visas is down by about 60% since the pandemic years.
He said wait times for passports have also gone down - four to six weeks - and he credited the online passport renewal program launched in September for reducing the backlog.
"So now most Americans who need to renew their passports can do it right from their homes, online, just uploading a photograph, sending it in. The turnaround time has gone down from a month to a week for those passports," he said, adding that more than a million Americans have used the online renewal system.
Raimondo said travel and tourism are good for the American economy - supporting about 10 million jobs and generating $2.3 trillion in economic activity.
She said 66 million people visited the U.S. last year, up from 50 million the year before.
Projections estimate that 90 million visitors will come to the U.S. in 2026.
"That, I want to point out, is a year earlier than our strategic goal," Raimondo said.
"So that is a tremendous amount of progress, that's a tremendous amount of economic activity, and it's a tremendous amount of Americans whose jobs will be more secure because of the work that we're doing," she said.
