[jvdh]

The headline is misleading. They are not planning to fingerprint all children. They are lowering the age at which refugee children are being fingerprinted (from 14 to 6). This is part of the EU process of making sure that refugees are handled properly.

[mschuster91]

The problem is that the fingerprint data will not be used exclusively for immigration purposes but also for general crime fighting.

I oppose that - because it is the first step to extend the surveillance state. Next to no one cares if refugees are forced to give up their fingerprints (except maybe the radical left), most people will actually silently approve of this, but who guarantees that in four years this won't be extended to every German?

And yes, there's precedence for politicians doing this - the Maut data, as well as the Vorratsdatenspeicherung (internet provider data), were once thought to be only for serious crimes but there are already plans to use the data also to fight "common lowlevel crime"...

We may trust our current governments but we cannot trust what future governments will do.

[bad_user]

Given the high rate of incidents that Europe is having with immigrants, the alternative is to close the borders. So at this point, pick your poison: let tens or hundreds of thousands die of war or starvation, or take away freedoms that they wouldn't have without having crossed those borders anyway.

I'm a libertarian at heart, I've been very sympathetic towards refugees, however seeing lots of immigrants misbehave in my trips to the UK and Germany, I'm beginning to understand nationalism and why people have a periodic tendency towards populism (e.g. Trump, Brexit, etc).

The whole purpose of fingerprinting is crime fighting. Nothing else. There's no such thing as "immigration purposes". And when you're going into somebody's house, you obey their rules, otherwise you're free to go elsewhere.

[mirekrusin]

I don't understand what's wrong about using this information against crime? It has such a low value when stolen (unless I'm missing something?) that I don't even have problem with doing it to every citizen.

When I was an expat in Brazil, the first thing Policia Federal did was to take my fingerprints - no problem with that. I imagine the same happens with immigrants in US and other countries.

Also I can imagine how difficult registering people who run from was is, surely there are cases with no documents, documents lost, abusive gangs registering people several times and claiming "borrowed cousins" as children they get more money for etc.

[nilved]

Yeah, flag this title. It's not even clickbait, it's just a lie.