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Comment by 4ad | Hacker News Reader

In many (most?) countries you can get a secondary passport that you can use with "unfriendly countries". You use that for one set of countries, and you use the primary one for USA and other countries that have poor relations with countries from the first set.

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I had three concurrently valid passports at one time, partially because getting multiple entry visas sometimes requires having [a] passport couriered to the country in question and I didn't want to be unable to travel while my passport was in Abuja.

Using that to lie to consular authorities is really stupid though. I've travelled to Yemen and to other countries that are 'suspicious' and never had any problems, if I'd lied about it I would almost certainly have been picked up on it (come on, you don't think the US government has a database of people who've travelled to Yemen or Pakistan on most major airlines?) and would have had some very difficult questions to answer.

I would not mention this ever on forums. You could at most have two passports at the same time from the US for reasons you describe, and the paperwork is very specific about surrendering the second the moment you are done with it.

So it is quite likely you were bending the rules, and I would not go around mentioning that. I mean you are talking about identity fraud at the fed level. The paperwork would have reminded you penalties for that are not so fun. I filled out some myself once.

I tried to get the second, not for Yemen but somewhere else not too far away. I told the US Embassy, and they told me to just use the one and it was not worth the subsequent hassle to apply for a second (or third in your case if that is truly possible). The stigma of where I was going was bad, but not enough they said to waste my time with an additional password.

I'm not an American and all my passports were legally issued by my government after following the (extremely hassle free and reasonable) application process. The additional passports were valid for two or three years (don't remember exactly), I certainly didn't need to surrender them and in any case I was using them constantly.

All I had to do was pay the processing fee and document why I needed them. Admittedly, the third one was harder to get and required an interview but even that was perfunctory.

I have heard that most countries are much less eager to give out passports than mine.

Sorry, I am an idiot. I thought in context you were indicating you did so with US passports.

Ignore my know-it-all attitude.

And some countries just stopped stamping passports, you'll just get a piece of paper you'll have to keep until you are leaving the country (Israel).

Japan has been doing this for about half a decade. Hong Kong started this practice at the same time as Israel.

Probably the same technology provider doing a global roll out based on country size.

I had no idea anyone considered Japan unfriendly.

Unless...could it be PRC?

A departure card like the type you're mentioning is pretty common, but isn't instead of a passport stamp.

It's instead of the passport stamp in Israel [0]. Otherwise you'd have problems getting into Jordan for example. (Other countries according to wikipedia: Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen).

Source: My own experience

[0] https://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/forums/middle-east/to...

I had the piece-of-paper as a tourist in the US in 2009. They removed it on my exit from the country - so my US trip shows up in my passport as a series of staple-holes.

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