Fingerprinting & Illegal Immigration in Japan

Yet another Japanese TV report about the new fingerprinting system at airports, this time with a special focus on illegal immigration:

The first couple minutes are pretty much a repeat of the introduction to the system we’ve seen in other TV clips, but 2 minutes and 30 seconds into the clip we are shown a particularly tall foreigner experiencing problems with the camera:

The report then shifts its focus to illegal immigration, displaying a graph that shows that illegal entries actually decreased in from 2005 to 2006 (but they’re still above the magic 10,000 line!):

Most of these illegal foreigners come to Japan to work. Once they’ve made their way past the airport immigration checks, it’s pretty hard to catch and deport them, states a Kansai Airport immigration official.

The most interesting part of the report comes around the 3 and a half minute mark, in which they actually meet an illegal immigrant who has been captured by the authorities at Kansai Airport (it was filmed earlier this year, prior to the new fingerprinting system):

The man shown is an Iranian who tried to enter Japan using a fake Greek passport. Immigration officials had given him a paper in Greek asking him to fill out some information about himself, but he couldn’t read the Greek and filled it out incorrectly. They later found his Iranian passport and he admitted the truth. He had bought the passport in Thailand for $2000, hoping that it could get him into Japan to find work (in the Japanese subtitles it claims he says in English that Japan is easier to enter illegally than the United States, but his English wasn’t so clear). Needless to say, he was kicked out of Japan.