Fingerprinting

U.S. Begins Fingerprinting Foreign Visitors.

No doubt many in the US will share the view of this Brazillian judge:

"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," said Federal Judge Julier Sebastiao da Silva in a court order to authorize the program in Brazil.

However, I ask: what's the big deal? When I lived in Colombia (and yes, I know that was an extended stay, not a brief one), I had to go to the headquarters of the Administrative Police and provide fingerprints (heck, at least one library, not to mention the bank, required prints before I could get access). And it was a whole less convient that using a computer at the airport at entry.

And when I filed for my student visa I had to have an FBI background check, amongst a whole host of other bureaucratic nonsense (including getting certificates of authenticity from the State of Texas to back up all the notaries used, i.e., I had to notarized the notaries who had notarized my documents). And while I may have griped about it (not to mention the cost, by the time it was all said and done, and the docs translated into Spanish, it cost over $200.00 to do all the paperwork for myself anf my wife--indeed, it may have been $200 per, I can't recall--it has been, amazingly, almost ten years since I did all that stuff), I did it.

Why did I do it? Because those were the rules of Colombia, and figured that they had the right to make their own rules.

I never felt violated, or that my rights (of which I had none, not being a Colombian citizen) were being violated. Rather, since I wanted to go to Colombia, I did what the Colombian government wanted me to do. I could have easily avoided these onerous requirements by staying home.