Giorgio Agamben is a professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics from the University of Verona (Italy). Prof. Agamben turned down an appointment as Visiting Professor at NYU this semester because of the fingerprinting and mugshot to which visitors from abroad must now submit:
I only want to suggest that it is probable that the tattooing at Auschwitz appeared like the most 'normal' and economic way to regulate the registration of deportees in the camp.
The biopolitical tattooing that today is being imposed on us to enter the United States is the start of a relay race of what tomorrow they could make us accept as normal registration of the identity of the good citizen in the mechanisms and gears of the state.
And just where is the DNC on this? I haven't heard anyone from our party condemn this new-age practise comparable to earmarking (the Jim Crow practice of clipping the ear of "high yellar" American black men lest they dare attempt to pass as "white.")
Fingerprinting and a mug shot of foreign visitors is offensive beyond measure.