A Flap About Fingerprints

By Jodie Morse

War is looming, and America stands at the highest alert. Seeking to batten down the country's domestic defenses, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) begins fingerprinting visitors and recording their race, weight and hair color. Those already living in the U.S. are ordered to report to the nearest post office to be printed and interviewed. The month is July--of 1940.

Sixty-two years later, Attorney General John Ashcroft has just unveiled a similar proposal tailored to this equally jittery but higher-tech moment. Set to take effect in the fall, the new program will fingerprint and photograph some 100,000 visitors from as many as two dozen nations deemed to pose an "elevated national security risk"; some visa holders already living here will also be questioned and printed. In a matter of seconds, the prints will be matched against an FBI database stocked with thousands of fingerprints lifted from locales as varied as al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and motels in Italy and Spain frequented by Osama bin Laden sympathizers. Once cleared, the visitors will be kept on a short leash, required to check in with the INS every time they change address and before they leave the country.

Though Ashcroft was intentionally vague about who will be registered, civil libertarians get the point. "This is clearly tarring a whole community with indelible ink," says Angela Kelley of the National Immigration Forum, "and it will make them much less likely to come forward with intelligence information we need from them." The Council on American-Islamic Relations likened the move to asking Muslims to don star-and-crescent armbands, just as the Nazis required Jews to wear Stars of David during World War II.

Legally, at least, the program is viable. The U.S. already holds visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya and Sudan to a higher immigration standard, requiring them to register and be fingerprinted and photographed at ports of entry. And the courts have consistently sided with the government on such immigration restrictions, including President Carter's order at the height of the Iran hostage crisis that all Iranian students studying in the U.S. register with the INS. That decision, though, was handed down before racial profiling became part of the national vocabulary.

Will the new measures screen out the bad guys or merely multiply the INS workload without enhancing security? Since January, the INS has been testing a new fingerprint-identification system at the border and has used it to arrest 1,400 wanted criminals. None had terrorist ties, but two were accused murderers and one was an alleged international jewel thief. Though the Sept. 11 hijackers took pains to enter this country initially on legal visas, it seems unlikely that any self-respecting al-Qaeda operative will send a "just moved" postcard to the INS. Even some officials within the agency are tempering their hopes. "There's a way around any system," says one. "None of them is foolproof." --By Jodie Morse. With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington