More on Japan’s New Immigration System: 5 Foreigners Kicked Out

The Japanese press is reporting that the new immigration system that fingerprints and photographs non-Japanese entering Japan netted 5 foreigners for eviction on its first day. Kyodo News reports that they were caught because “their fingerprints were identical to those of five people who had been evicted,” but Arudou Debito has read further into the case and disputes this claim:

Three of the five were caught for funny passports, the other two for other reasons left unclear but at Immigration’s discretion. Which means bagging these five was unrelated to the Fingerprint policy. In other words, this sort of thing happens on a daily basis and is not news. Unless there is a political reason for making it so.

The Japanese press has reported a variety of problems that occurred with the system on the first day, including a case at Hakata Airport in which fingerprint reading machines could not properly read the fingers of several foreigners coming in from South Korea. Immigration eventually let some of them in without performing successful fingerprint scans, claiming that the machines have trouble reading elderly people’s prints.　 Similar errors are being reported at other airports such as Narita, which could not read at least 21 foreigners’ fingerprints.

In related immigration news, a timely article in the Yomiuri Shinbun reports that an “Al-Queda affiliate” named Lionel Dumont had successfully entered Japan with fake passports on multiple occassions under the old immigration system. The article also mentions the Japanese government is aiming to reduce the number of foreigners illegally staying in Japan from 200,000 to 125,000 by 2008.