Originally Posted by TierFlyer
Really? I just gave several examples. And if you don't have a very big balance at your bank, they'll take your fingerprint on the back of your paycheck.
These are all examples of getting one fingerprint taken. Getting them all is different. Furthermore, the percentage of people getting fingerprinted (for office access or standard banking) is pretty low. Many people already complain about this kind of thing and avoid doing business with companies that operate in this manner. Dollar or one of the other car rental agencies started taking fingerprints as a condition of rental, but, IIRC, canceled the program after receiving complaints.
And yet Disney has an all time high number of visitors from Europe due to the ForEx situation.
I would agree that for a big discount people would be willing to do something that they wouldn't otherwise do. I don't have anything other than anecdotal evidence that travel is being negatively impacted by the "US Visit" program, but then, I haven't seen any hard evidence to the contrary.
Intuitively one wouldn't expect the program to have a positive effect (certainly nobody decides to travel to the US for the purpose of being photographed and fingerprinted), so the (intuitive) best case would be a zero effect.
Actually, I was talking about the CCTV network in Britan, which I hope we will never have.
Why not?
And it would not have helped them stave off their eventual doom - communism/socialism just don't work compared to capitalism.
And capitalism doesn't work very well when governments discourage free trade by continuously thinking up new ways to discourage trade and travel.