Originally Posted by
mlin32
That would be nice but that's naive.
Until now, the EU has had no digital way to track immigration and register visitors like practically every other major developed country in the world (typical Europe, 15 years behind). All other major countries using biometrics (USA, China come to mind) still have an immigration officer handling foreign passport holders. Collecting fingerprints, verifying visas, purpose of visits, etc...... still better done with a human. EES just allows digital tracking. Otherwise with stamps, you could overstay and an officer could never notice if he/she didn't bother to match up the entry stamps, immigrants could commit crimes without fingerprints in the database, etc......
It’s not naive to expect this will lead to e-gates without human interaction in most cases. Not least because (a) UK pax can already use e-gates at many EU airports where the only human action is for stamping which will soon be not needed and (b) it has been publicly announced that they are going to expand egates.
That doesn’t mean human interaction will disappear entirely but it’s certainly the case that in future for ordinary UK pax once registration done they should be able to walk through just like EU pax can here.