EES: Who Actually Benefits?

The SMH ran a long piece this week on delays at European entry points caused by the new Entry/Exit System (EES) biometric enrolment program.

The EES is supposed to stop illegal immigrants and speed up entry and exit. That’s the headline benefits they are selling. The article missed the real story entirely by implying that enrolment into the EES was taking forever.

I enrolled in the EES a couple of months ago in Amsterdam. The enrolment itself was quick. What wasn’t quick was everything that came after, because I was travelling with an eight-year-old. Children can’t use the biometric gates, so families get sent to the manual passport control lane. Two hours gone.

In that manual lane were other families and travellers from countries whose governments haven’t yet invested in biometric passport infrastructure: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Cambodia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Vietnam, Zimbabwe – and roughly sixty others, almost all in the global south.

The Dutch, meanwhile, have used the new biometric gates as justification to reduce the number of passport officers that service the manual entry lanes. Efficiency savings, funded by a smaller throughput assumption that simply doesn’t match reality.

If you hold a biometric passport and travel without children, EES is a genuine improvement. You can enter almost without stopping.

What the EU has technically introduced is discrimination against parents and against travellers from the poorer half of the world.

That is very European: on the surface, very fair and reasonable, but underneath all for discrimination that is in their own interests.