http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,19039906%5E24170%5E%5Enbv%5E24169,00.html
Kinda nice to have this agenda exposed to air and sunlight
Latin leader keen on ID chips
MAY 09, 2006
COLOMBIAN President Alvaro Uribe may have been thinking aloud to a pair of US senators who say he proposed implanting microchips in seasonal workers to help the US control illegal immigration.
Uribe's alleged comments, as US politicians debated the biggest overhaul of immigration policies in decades, dismayed many Colombians when news of them appeared in the country's leading newspaper.
"It would be a blatant violation of human rights," Bogota lawyer Jorge Pinilla says.
Details of Uribe's conversation with US politicians last month were revealed by Senator Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, in a report he read into the congressional record last week.
He and Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, met Uribe, the US's staunchest ally in Latin America, last month in Colombia.
(((Okay, who would you rather have as your national leader:
the arphid fan here, who is "America's staunchest South American ally," or that oil-crazy proletarian leftie in Venezuela next door?)))
During the informal meeting, Specter expressed concerns about seasonal workers who move to the US to work temporarily on farms and then don't return to their country when their visa has elapsed.
"President Uribe said he would consider having Colombian workers have microchips implanted in their bodies before they are permitted to enter the US for seasonal work," Specter told Congress on April 25.
"I doubted that implanting microchips would be effective since the immigrant workers might be able to remove them." (((Yeah, Senator, and those forearm tattoos in the Nazi forced-labor camps tended to blur with the decades... heck, some people plain forgot they'd ever happened.)))
Uribe refused to say whether he proposed microchip implants, acknowledging only that he encouraged the senators to replace "draconian" immigration laws with a temporary work program that treats Colombian workers humanely, such as one the country already shares with Spain and Canada.
"If the US with all its technology, computers and chips, doesn't have the means to know who enters or leaves the country, where are we," he says.
The offices of Specter and Sessions did not return calls seeking comment on their meeting with Uribe.
Using microchips the size of a grain of rice to track the movement of cattle is nothing new.
Florida company VeriChip is marketing implants in humans to government and corporations as a way of controlling access to secure areas and to keep tabs on sex offenders and other felons.
Never before has anyone proposed using body chips for immigrants. (((Unless they are Katherine Albrecht, who has pretty well had this one figured from the get-go.)))
The idea, bound to get under the skin of privacy advocates, is dismissed even by supporters of stricter immigration control.
