Internal passport

An internal passport is an identity document that may or may not be used by a country to control and monitor the internal movement and residence of its people. Internal passports have been used by Imperial Russia and its successor states, France, the Confederate States of America, the Soviet Union, the Ottoman Empire, South Africa during apartheid, and other countries. Countries that currently have internal passports include:

When passports first emerged, there was no clear distinction between internal and international ones. Later, some countries developed sophisticated systems of passports for various purposes and various groups of population. Uses for internal passports have included restricting citizens of a subdivided state to employment in their own area (preventing their migration to richer cities or regions), clearly recording the ethnicity of citizens to enforce segregation or prevent passing, and controlling access to sensitive sites or closed cities.

Currently, some countries still have internal passports as a part of their bureaucratic heritage but do not use them to restrict the movement of people. In such countries, internal passport are essentially identification documents in booklet form.

In many countries, the word "passport" is only used in modern language to denote a document issued for the purpose of international travel, which is subject to discretionary permission. Hence the widespread misconception that internal passports are necessarily the instrument of discretionary limitation of traveling and residence in countries that use them.

On the other hand, in post-Soviet countries, the word "passport" is implied to merely mean a primary identification document, especially if has the form of a booklet. Nevertheless, it is also extended by analogy to other forms of identification documents. For example, the proposed scheme to replace old-fashioned internal passport booklets with plastic identification cards in Ukraine still calls the latter "passports".

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Wikipedia