airportannotated

Kunst probably doesn't look very different than the "typical" white American. This story would have benefited from other perspectives. Here are two that came from a competing newspaper:

Nishal Ramphal went through immigration in New York, where she was fingerprinted, before heading on to Los Angeles on South African Airlines. "As much I hate to admit it . . . you see some justification for some kind of profiling," said Ramphal, 29. "But it's pretty overt."

Not everyone agreed that the new measures were necessary.

"It's like being a prisoner," said Pedro Quinto, a 26-year-old student from Mexico who arrived at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. "It's really fast but I don't like the idea."

Their names suggest that they might be the kind of people who would receive special scrutiny in this kind of program, but their reactions are very different.

Airport screening program takes flight

Miami—U.S. immigration officers began fingerprinting and photographing tens of thousands of visitors arriving from certain other countries on Monday, in what federal authorities described as a sophisticated new security measure to monitor who enters the country and how long they stay.

A total of 115 airports that carry international flights, including several in Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean with U.S. customs booths, introduced the extra layer of screening on Monday, along with cruise ship terminals at 14 major seaports. Though the travel industry had feared significant delays as the program got under way, the Department of Homeland Security, which is administering it, said the problems were minimal and that the procedure added perhaps a minute, at most, to immigration processing.

The screening program began as American officials remained acutely concerned about potential terrorist threats on foreign airliners, particularly those from Britain. Since Christmas Eve about a dozen flights have been grounded or delayed over fears that terrorists had plotted to commandeer jetliners.

Officials said Monday that they were concentrating on flights between London and Washington, D.C., as possible targets for terrorists, but they had concluded that the critical danger period on U.S.-bound flights from France and Mexico had now passed.

Officials said delays and possibly cancellations on the London-Washington route were likely to continue indefinitely.

In contrast, concern has lessened on international flights into Los Angeles from both Paris and Mexico City. Those routes, like the London-Washington flights, were the subject of intense concern for much of the last two weeks, but officials said intelligence narrowed the prospect of attacks to the Christmas and New Year's holidays.

American officials said that they believed the fingerprinting program would strengthen border protection over the long haul, but they did not expect it to have any immediate impact on the recent efforts to deter another terrorist attack since the country went to code orange.

Citizens of 27 countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and most European nations, are exempted from the program if they are visiting as tourists for fewer than 90 days.

But if citizens of those countries are traveling here on work or student visas, or for more than 90 days, they are subject to the new procedures. They, along with all residents of other countries - about 24 million travelers a year - now must be fingerprinted and photographed.

Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee is the nation's 70th-busiest airport for international passenger traffic, one notch below Key West, Fla., and just ahead of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Mitchell has one scheduled international non-stop flight. Passengers on that flight, from Toronto, can be screened first in Toronto.

The airport has numerous international charter flights to and from vacation destinations such as Cancun, Mexico.

Foreigners entering the United States through Milwaukee can be photographed and fingerprinted here, according to Transportation Security Administration officials.

"But there are very few people coming into the U.S. through Milwaukee," said David Knudson, Mitchell's federal security director.

Between 5:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday, 27,420 foreigners were fingerprinted and photographed under the new rules, department officials said.

"So far it's going well," said Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner of customs and border protection, said of the program, which the government calls the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology.

The new procedures allow customs officials to immediately verify visitors' identities, check their criminal backgrounds and determine if they are on watch lists of suspected terrorists and other criminals. The photos of most and fingerprints of some visitors will already be on file from when they applied for visas in their home countries. Eventually, every foreigner subject to the new rules will be electronically fingerprinted before traveling here, said Bill Strassberger, a department spokesman.

In a news conference at Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport, Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, said 21 foreigners were found to be on watch lists during a two-month pilot of the program. Some were wanted for crimes such as rape, he said.

Some travelers interviewed said they did not mind and even welcomed the added measures, while others denounced them as an invasion of privacy.

Holder Kunst, who was arriving at Boston's Logan International Airport from Frankfurt, Germany, was unfazed.

"It doesn't bother me at all," said Kunst, 32, a German who runs a marketing company in Boston. "It's just a fact of life these days that there's enhanced security."

Kunst said the digital imaging was surprisingly fast, adding, "It would have bothered me a lot more if it was the old-fashioned fingerprinting, using ink."