Daily Archive

We landed back in Britain yesterday morning.  Arriving at Heathrow’s Terminal 4, we took the opportunity to use the IRIS booth instead of going to a passport officer.  I have to say that any friends at U.S. Immigration should take careful note: they ought to speak to their opposite numbers at the U.K. Home Office and see how the U.S. is falling behind technologically.  (Easy to pick on, when the Home Office does right it also ought to be commended.) 

IRIS is far superior to what U.S. citizens and “green card” residents have to endure to enter the U.S. The booth opens as you approach, you step in, and a plumy female recorded voice tells you “Look into the mirror“. You stare ahead, and your iris is within seconds checked against the registered database, in which your immigration details are stored.

I had so little trouble, and the exit doors opened so quickly, I didn’t realize I was finished; suddenly, I was out and standing behind passport control.  The British citizen wife, following immediately behind me, took a little longer because the recorded woman told her to “please step back” a bit, and she had to open her eyes a bit wider.  But within a few moments it easily worked for her, too.

Yesterday was the first time I have ever entered Britain without getting questioned about my status and having my passport stamped.  As a permanent resident and not a citizen, I understood the reason both had to be done.  However, even at a U.S. frontier, not just foreign passport holders but even U.S. citizens, have to have their passports stamped as “arrived”.

I have never understood that necessity regarding that treatment for the latter group.  After all, a U.S. citizen cannot be denied admission to the U.S. after the presentation of a valid passport.  So the need for such a “nod” of official approval has been a practice that has always, for myself, been grating and had something distasteful about it, given that every American under no prior legal restraint has as much right to leave and re-enter the U.S. unhindered by official “watchmen” as he would to travel between points within the U.S. 

Simply put, re-entering our U.S. is not supposed to “feel” in the slightest like returning to a former Soviet bloc state, where the state decreed that those returning from the “corrupting abroad” had to be noted as being “acceptable” for re-admittance. That’s not to say that “stamping” by the U.S. is meant to be oppressive in that Soviet sense, of course. Rather, it is likely just typical of an often petty over-officiousness and paperwork-obsessiveness that is characteristic of so much American governance, and which is never quite dealt with because, uh, well, “We’ve always done it like that”.

Over here, though, as IRIS demonstrates, a state can also carefully track those entering and exactly when . . . without piles of paper.  And immigration desks staffed by uniformed officers giving an often surly (and often intimidating) once-over and an official “smack” of re-admittance — as if those re-entering have just returned from “the outer rim” — are also unnecessary.