THE US: Up to 100,000 "high-risk" visitors to the US each year will now be fingerprinted and required to register with the immigration service within 30 days of arrival, and then once a year, the Attorney General, Mr John Ashcroft, has announced. Failure to comply may lead to deportation.
Those likely to be affected are travellers - specifically young men - from Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, and other Middle East or Islamic states, although the administration has declined to list specific countries. Civil rights groups have protested that the measures amount to racial profiling.
The move will affect students, workers, researchers and tourists, and all foreigners from designated countries who do not hold green cards, an official said.
The new rules will apply to people who stay more than a month and are based on an alien registration law put in place in the 1940s during the second World War.
Only visitors from Iraq Iran, Libya and Sudan are currently required to go through the registration process.
"On September 11th, the American definition of national security changed and changed forever," Mr Ashcroft said. "In this new war, our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in. Their camouflage is not forest green, but rather it is the colour of common street clothing." Thirty five million foreigners visit the US each year.
Ms Judy Golub of the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned that the move could represent the first step toward requiring all visitors - and perhaps all citizens - to carry government identification cards.
"We don't need false solutions to real problems and this is what this is," she said.
"The Bush Administration is, step by step, isolating Muslim and Arab communities, both in the eyes of the government and the American public," an American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel, Mr Timothy Edgar, said. "This latest move needs to be seen in the larger context of all the actions targeted at people of Middle Eastern descent since September 11th."
Mr James Zogby of the Arab American Institute warned that the Immigration and Naturalisation Service lacks the technology to carry out the plan. "You can't take a broken, overloaded system and overload it with yet more information and not expect it to break down further," he said.
