“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
About 117 out of 313 million Americans have passports. However only about five percent of those people actually used them to travel overseas (not counting Canada or Mexico) and that is a very small number indeed. So, we still have a long way to go.
Source: Huffington Post 2009 survey