The Ink Is Going

A passport stamp is not a souvenir, whatever the traveler thinks. It is a date and a place, printed in ink, and it exists so that somebody can count.

Here is what it counts. Most countries let a visitor stay for a fixed number of days. In the Schengen area of Europe, a visitor from outside can stay ninety days in any period of a hundred and eighty. The entry stamp says when the clock started; the exit stamp says when it stopped. Without those two marks, nobody at the border, and nobody at the desk when you apply for your next visa, can prove how long you were there. The stamp is the proof, and it belongs to the officer as much as it belongs to you.

That explains why some borders stamp and some don’t. Inside a free-travel area there is no arrival to record, so a French passport crossing into Belgium is not stamped at all; there is nothing to count. Where a visa is needed, the visa is usually a sticker or a page of its own, and the stamp goes beside it. And customs is a different business entirely: what you declare at the green channel or the red one has nothing to do with the ink.

Now the ink is going. At an electronic gate, a camera and a chip do in a few seconds what an immigration officer used to do with a rubber stamp, and your entry is kept in a database instead of on page twelve. Europe has begun replacing the stamp with an electronic record of entries and exits. The counting still happens. It just happens where you can’t see it.

And something small is going with it. For about a hundred years a passport was two things at once: a legal document and an accidental scrapbook. People keep the old ones in a drawer, and they can open one at a page and say, that was the summer in Istanbul, look, the fifth of August. A child who gets a first passport this year will have exactly the same right to travel, and a completely empty book.