Latin leader keen on ID chips
STEVE
GOLDSTEIN / Knight Ridder | May 9 2006
COLOMBIAN President Alvaro Uribe may have
been thinking aloud to a pair of US senators who say he proposed implanting
microchips in seasonal workers to help the US control illegal immigration.
Uribe's alleged comments, as US politicians debated
the biggest overhaul of immigration policies in decades, dismayed many Colombians
when news of them appeared in the country's leading newspaper.
"It would be a blatant violation of human rights," Bogota lawyer
Jorge Pinilla says.
Details of Uribe's conversation with US politicians
last month were revealed by Senator Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, in a
report he read into the congressional record last week.
He and Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, met Uribe,
the US's staunchest ally in Latin America, last month in Colombia.
During the informal meeting, Specter expressed
concerns about seasonal workers who move to the US to work temporarily on
farms and then don't return to their country when their visa has elapsed.
"President Uribe said he would consider having
Colombian workers have microchips implanted in their bodies before they
are permitted to enter the US for seasonal work," Specter told Congress
on April 25.
"I doubted that implanting microchips would be
effective since the immigrant workers might be able to remove them."
Uribe refused to say whether he proposed microchip
implants, acknowledging only that he encouraged the senators to replace
"draconian" immigration laws with a temporary work program that
treats Colombian workers humanely, such as one the country already shares
with Spain and Canada.
"If the US with all its technology, computers
and chips, doesn't have the means to know who enters or leaves the country,
where are we," he says.
The offices of Specter and Sessions did not return
calls seeking comment on their meeting with Uribe.
Using microchips the size of a grain of rice to track
the movement of cattle is nothing new.
Florida company VeriChip is marketing implants in humans
to government and corporations as a way of controlling access to secure
areas and to keep tabs on sex offenders and other felons.
Never before has anyone proposed using body chips for
immigrants.
The idea, bound to get under the skin of privacy advocates,
is dismissed even by supporters of stricter immigration control.
Prison
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