What happens on the immigration gate if a passenger lost their fingerprints?
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 25 Jul, 2023
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My mother have disability in her right arm. When entering Singapore, as soon as the immigration officer seen the disability, he immediately waved off and granted entry. No further questions asked.
Fingerprint is not a hard requirement. Immigration officers have a lot of discretion regarding this.
My wife has no fingerprints, yet they try to scan them everywhere and we spend like 30 minutes just waiting for them to realise the fact every time… It starts to be frustrating.
I know someone who has their biometrics set up for quicker passage through the lines, and then first time out couldn’t get their fingerprints to scan properly (because their hands were too dry, I think). The official in charge very calmly went through the rest of the paperwork and processed it just fine without the fingerprints, sending them through.
Fingerprints are fast and easy, this person would have been through quicker if the scanning had worked, but they cannot be required until they are completely hundred percent reliable – not just in scanning but in the machine not freezing up or throwing errors or anything.
Right now, fingerprints will either not-match based on factors that affect the skin – including hydration, blood flow, injury or illness (rashes or the like), swelling, or pruning, or even just dirty, exact way it is pressed or moved against the scanner, and others – or else it will sometimes match falsely based on such errors. Either false negatives, or false positives… or both, that is also a possibility. I had all the same issues when I had a fingerprint scanner on my computer – it was mostly reliable, but not always, and one had to be careful and have other ways in – and I don’t imagine the tech has become hundred-percent reliable since then.
So there will be options for those cases where it isn’t working – even if, over time, the scanners become reliable enough to make this rather rare, it will still have to be somehow possible to deal with outlying oddball cases.
No, fingerprint are “optional”. Sometime it is not possible to take them, or some people have not very distinctive fingerprints (as measured on common devices). So there is alternate ways to check identity. Note: it is also possible that the biometric passport don’t contain the fingerprints, for the above reason.
Note: it is not the easier method to pass checkpoints, and usually it needs real reasons not to use standard procedures, but there are well know and often used on all airports / checkpoints.
Biometrics are now more than just fingerprints. Retina/iris scans, face recognition software etc are all being deployed where necessary in lieu of fingerprints.
There are many people who don’t have both hands and by extension their fingers however they are able to travel into countries like the USA which typically fingerprint visitors.
From official correspondence between the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) and the UK Border Association (UKBA):
What if the migrant has no fingers or hands? If you are physically
unable to provide fingerprints we will take a photograph of the facial
image and record on the database the fact that you are physically unable to provide fingerprints.”
The world at large is becoming more and more sensitive and accommodating of people with disabilities and this issue has been considered and accommodations made.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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