This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Recently, I've had the great privilege of traveling abroad. I've been to Italy and Spain,

Japan a couple of times, England, Scotland, so I've been pulling out my American passport a lot lately.

And every time I present it to a customs official, I always get nervous.

I honestly think it's meant to make you

nervous. There is something inherently fraught and maybe even a little ugly about the ritual of

presenting your passport and that this little booklet you're carrying around with you, whether it

says you're from the United States or Japan or Haiti, confers so much power. I can't stand the idea

that your value as a person could be determined by the fact of where you were born. But the

minute you're asked to show your passport, it's obvious that's how the world works, especially

when billions of people live in countries whose passports grant them little to know meaningful access to the rest of the world.

While an estimated 850 million people do not even have the documents necessary to prove their nationality or legal existence,

which is why we wanted to share this story from the podcast, Far From Home, by frequent 99PI contributor, Scott Gurian.

A while back, Scott sat down with someone who deliberately surrendered his official nationality,

including his passport, and began issuing what he believed was a better form of identification.

We'll let Scott take it from here.

Back in October of 2024,

on the eve of the presidential election, Donald Trump held a giant political rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. And one of the warm-up speakers was his soon-to-be political advisor

Stephen Miller. In a fiery speech, Miller expressed

what would soon become the throughline of the country's new anti-immigration policy.

America is for Americans and Americans only. The rise of people like Stephen Miller

shows that we're living in an era when nationhood and national identity

...