We stand to lose our soul through fingerprints
Originally published on September 13, 2002 by the Houston Chronicle
By Christopher Ho

Attorney General John Ashcroft's plan to fingerprint all visitors from currently unpopular countries - which went into effect Wednesday - has a sickening familiarity to it. Though dressed up in the rhetoric of "antiterrorism" - a term that loses more meaning by the day as it is stretched to cover almost anything related to public safety or immigration - this program is just a regression to past periods of knee-jerk racism we thought we had left behind.

The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, as it is blandly named, initially designates all visa holders from Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Syria and Libya as "potential national security risks." They must submit to being fingerprinted and photographed as they enter the United States, and must keep the Immigration and Naturalization Service updated on their whereabouts. Among other things, they will be asked such crafty questions as, "Are you a member of a terrorist organization?" Eventually, an estimated 100,000 persons annually from more than two dozen predominantly Arab and Muslim countries will likewise be deemed to be such "risks."

It is hard to understand this plan as anything other than an attempt by the Bush administration to recover from the drumbeat of publicized failures of the FBI, CIA and the White House to pursue critical leads prior to Sept. 11, 2001. The plan's flaws make that conclusion hard to avoid.

• It assumes that "terrorists" will obligingly enter the United States through legal channels. Other ways of entering the country - for instance, via Canada - remain eminently available. But the result will be that law-abiding nationals of the targeted countries will be subjected to procedures usually saved for criminal arrestees.
  
  
• It is unknown what safeguards, if any, will prevent the misuse of the data the program collects. And past experience suggests that there is no practical reason served by collecting it in the first place. INS stopped doing so in the 1970s because it led to a glut of useless information. Given INS' bungling ways - including its after-the-fact issuance of a visa to Sept. 11 leader Mohammed Atta - there is scant reason to think it could put this information to any bona fide use now, either. (And how, again, could 9/11 have been prevented if we'd had his fingerprints on file?)
  
  
• Finally, because it targets individuals from predominantly Arab and Muslim countries, the program amounts to racial profiling - a practice unanimously condemned when it happens on our highways. Citizens of those nations will be stigmatized and treated as higher security risks than, say, white persons from Western Europe. Its "guilt by association" treatment of entire peoples will only hurt the United States in the long run, in terms of trade, tourism and our international stature - particularly in the Arab and Islamic world, where we now need it the most.

Imagine the outcry from English and French visa holders' American relatives if they alone had to ink their fingers and pose for mug shots. But in the now-acceptable demonization of Middle Easterners and Muslims, we now see them only as the "Other" - people who, through the lens of our prejudices, are only an undifferentiated, suspect mass for which this dehumanizing treatment is appropriate. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., recently opined, "One isn't going to look for blonde Norwegians." (But what about Englishman Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber"? What about Jose Padilla, the Brooklyn-born "dirty bomb" suspect?) Her crass rationalization exemplifies the mind-set that led to Franklin D. Roosevelt's infamous Executive Order 9066, which sent more than 120,000 loyal Americans of Japanese heritage to concentration camps during World War II because they had the bad luck of looking like the enemy. Even President Reagan recognized the heinous nature of that similar "national security" measure when he signed legislation requiring the government to compensate and apologize to its surviving victims. How little we learn from the past.

Announcing the fingerprinting plan in June, Ashcroft said, "We are an open country that welcomes the people of the world to visit our blessed land," but added: "Asking some visitors to verify their activities while they are here is fully consistent with that outlook." Though we are apparently meant to be reassured by those words, they are in fact chilling Orwellian doublespeak - a fitting way to usher in a Big Brother-like program more suited to a police state than an idealistic democracy.

At some point, we either need to live up to our noble vision of ourselves, or acknowledge that we aren't the nation we say we are. Defending against terrorism doesn't require us to lose our soul.