The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

50 who are also thinking of postponing their retirement dates. If the FSPS retirement age discon- nect affects you and your plans for retirement, please let our AFSA rep- resentatives know. Nick Quackenbush General Services Officer Embassy Nassau Reinventing the Wheel There is much talk about creating a system for the INS to photograph and fingerprint all arriving aliens in order to keep track of them for national security purposes. When I joined the Foreign Service 50 years ago, a standard part of the visa-issuing system was to require fingerprints and two photographs of each visa applicant before a visa could be issued. One photo and the finger- print card were sent to the FBI. All non-citizen, non-green-card- holders were required to obtain a visa before a ship or airline would allow them aboard. Any transportation company that delivered an undocu- mented alien was subject to a major fine. Around 1970, word was sent to the field that the FBI was so far behind in filing fingerprint cards from the State Department that we should discontinue fingerprinting visa appli- cants. As part of the tourism promo- tion program sometime in the late 1980s, citizens of several Western European countries that did not require visas of U.S. citizens were allowed to enter the U.S. without visas on a reciprocal basis. We’re reinventing the wheel with all this talk about fingerprinting and photographing those entering the U.S. It would make much more sense to return to the system of requiring visas of all non-citizens applying for entry to the U.S. and to do the photographing and finger- printing as part of the visa-issuing process. Applicants could be handled on an individual basis, rather than as part of an arriving planeload of 300 in a crowded airport with new planes arriving every 10 minutes. Security questions could be handled locally by delaying visa approval a day or two while inquiries were made to local police or security people. Imposing these requirements on immigration personnel at ports of entry seems both inefficient and inad- equate from the standpoint of ensur- ing real security checks. David Timmins FSO, retired Salt Lake City, Utah A P R I L 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 11 L E T T E R S 2000 N. 14th Street Suite 500 Arlington, VA 22201 Telephone (703) 797-3259 Fax (703) 524-7559 Tollfree (800) 424-9500