The 2012 bill proposes fingerprinting and collecting identification photo when a foreign national enters and register in Korea.

On November 11th, the Korean government advanced a revised immigration law in the National Assembly and is pressing for it to pass into legislation by the end of the year. The core contents of the reform is as follows: 1) to eliminate criticism on illegal crackdowns, the term “protection” will encapsulate “arrest” and “incarceration”, 2) Upon entry into Korea, foreigners must register fingerprints and take identification photos. 

The Ministry of Justice has been promoting this misguided reform for years, and has recently been exaggerating the incidence of foreigners’ crime to create a propitious atmosphere to its passing. If the Ministry of Justice wished to end the outrage about human rights violations, they would achieve their goal better by ending the illegal crackdowns, instead of making the law even more absurd. Their focus on legal recognition of the current raids, which entails an unannounced infiltration into houses and factories to catch undocumented residents, unabashedly shows their apparent disregard for human rights.

The compilation of fingerprints and facial records is an especially dangerous idea.

Of all the immigrants who make their way into  Korea, it is obvious that people coming from the Asian countries will be the first targeted.   This unjust system would effectively assume  all aliens entering Korea as potential criminals. The Korean government, however, maintains that there form is necessary for national security. There form,the Korean government argues, would put a halt to an illegal entry into the country (reducing  the number of illegal residents ) as well as stop criminals and terrorists from entering. However, the real effects of such measures are still unknown. For the last three years, the United States, forexample, has been collecting digitalized finger prints and photographs of all entering aliens, pumping one hundred million dollars into its search system. Todate, the fingerprints and photographs of sixty-four million people have been collected, yet only one thousand three hundred criminals and immigration  offenders have been caught. What’s more, of these, almost none have been actually detained as terror suspects.