Bruner Blog

Racial Profiling on Visas

This is disgusting. The Bush administration is now proposing to get fingerprints for visa holders, but spefically from Muslims and Middle Easterners. I have no problem with fingerprinting visa holders (although my wife, a Hungarian citizen, may not be thrilled to hear me say it). What’s the big deal about fingerprints? If you’re law abiding, why worry about it? Back when I was a temp in college, I had to get fingerprinted to work for an afternoon at Bankers Trust, so somewhere the FBI has my prints on record (tho how they could find them without computers I’d like to know).

I lived in Hungary for five years, and true enough, I was at best semi-legal the whole time, due to a number of factors, including youthful expat-arrogance, an immigration bureaucracy that made the INS look like a walk in the park, and the fact that it was so easy to cheat the system there back then. But had it not been, and had I really wanted to stay in the country badly enough, I would have done what it took to be legal, including fingerprints. My father has just moved back to Hungary (no, we’re not Hungarian, we just like the place), and the hoops they’re having him jump thru to get legal are incredible.

But my point is, finger prints are not the objection, despite what my privacy-phreak friends might believe. Hell, I don’t even strongly object to the idea of national identity cards, seeing as we already need official IDs to drive a car or even be a passenger on a plane (the only difference being you can forge a drivers license at a Times Square gift shop in five minutes).

The outrage is the blatant racial profiling being proposed. Aside from the fact that it goes so obviously against our sense of civil liberties and fair play, it’s so narrow minded it is stupid in the extreme. Does this administration really believe that Muslims and Middle Easterners are the only groups of people in the world that are angry enough with U.S. policies to resort to terrorism? I’m not saying anyone is justified in doing so, but it’s absurdly niave to assume Middle Easterners are the only threat we face in the next 50 years. When some environmental extremists from New Zealand blow up a dam or whatever, then we’ll finger print New Zealanders, too? It’s like the foolishness that we all have to have our shoes examined at the airport b/c one guy tried to bring a bomb on-board that way. When the “hat bomber” strikes, then they’ll examine everyone’s shoes and hats, at least until the “belt bomber” strikes…

I’m all for keeping better tabs on foreigners in this country. Obviously, I don’t want to see a police state where IDs and retina scans are demanded of anyone on a regular basis, but enough (if not “everything”) has changed as of September 11 that I don’t think fingerprinting visa applicants is asking too much. This administration, however, seems determined to flush America’s “moral authority” down the toilet with assine, indefensibly racist policies like this one.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 7th, 2002 at 9:43 am and is filed under aa-home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.