| Even the most loyal allies will give their fingerprints Yesterday, Americans began taking photographs and scanning fingerprints of guests from 27 countries visiting the United States under a visa-free regime for a period of no more than 90 days. This measure will affect 13 million people annually entering the United States from 22 European countries (including Great Britain, France, Germany), as well as Australia, Brunei, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore. Only foreign diplomats, children under 14 years of age and people over 79 years of age are exempt from the procedure. As US Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Asa Hutchinson said in Washington, “The United States continues to be a hospitable nation,” and airport procedures themselves are “fast, easy and clean.”
So far, 27 visa-free countries have been exempted from such procedures. The US Congress initially intended to enact this requirement on October 26, 2003, then, at the request of the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, delayed scanning for a year. However, new measures began to be applied ahead of schedule due to the fact that not all residents of the countries of the privileged visa-free club managed to receive new passports with biometric data.
The main goal of the innovation is to identify individuals who have violated American immigration laws, have a criminal past, or are suspected of involvement in terrorism. Facial photography and fingerprint scanning are conducted at 115 airports and 14 seaports in the United States.
Thus, yesterday Washington ended a kind of discrimination. After all, back on January 5, a similar procedure was introduced in relation to countries throughout the rest of the world, including Russia. Although all this takes no more than 15 seconds and is carried out in parallel with the verification of documents, scanning caused irritation to those who were not included in the privileged “list of twenty-seven”. Some countries, such as Brazil, have even imposed the same rules on US citizens. Over the past nine months, 8.5 million people have been photographed and scanned upon arrival in the United States. The Americans were able to catch 280 violators. Andrey ZLOBIN |
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