Fingerprint Scanner Scares Refugees Away From Safe Haven

id="article-body" class="row" section="article-body"> This is part of our Road Trip 2016 summer series "Life, Disrupted," about how technology is helping with the global refugee crisis -- if at all. <br><br>Editors' note: On October 24, French police began to clear refugees out of the Jungle as a prelude to demolishing the camp, which charities say holds 5,500 people. Earlier in the year, we visited the facility. This story describes what we found. <br><br>In March, French authorities bulldozed the northern half of a squalid tent city in Calais that houses about 5,500 refugees and is known as "The Jungle." In its place, people were offered clean beds, running water and secure shelter at a camp built from shipping containers. <br><br>You might think that's an easy trade. But Afghan refugee Darya Khan, 30, agonized over the decision. <br><br>Khan's concern: Claiming one of the 1,500 beds in the container camp would require him to use the high-tech hand scanner that unlocks the facility's turnstiles. That's a problem for the inhabitants of the camp, who associate fingerprints with a European Union law that lets immigration officials deport refugees and migrants. <br><br>"The container is safer," Khan tells me, "but people don't trust the container fingerprints."<br><br>Enlarge Image The notorious "Jungle" refugee camp is an overcrowded, unsanitary tent city in Calais, France. <br><br>Stephen Shankland/CNET The French government and charities like Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, are trying to replace the chaos of the Jungle with safe, secure and sanitary facilities. The Calais container camp and another camp at Grande-Synthe, some 25 miles away, were designed to give thousands of displaced people temporary shelter, security and access to clean water. <br><br>They are meant to be more than habitable. They are meant to be humane.<br><br>Those good intentions, though, are all too easily undermined. The biometric security system, made by Paris firm Zalix and maintained by French private security contractor Biro Sécurité, was installed without understanding the concerns of the people on the ground. The tech isn't much different from the fingerprint sensor in an iPhone, but it's scaring people away from a safe environment. <br><br>In June, my colleague Stephen Shankland and I visited three camps in Calais to get a sense of how -- or if -- technology was helping refugees. We found volunteers offering free Wi-Fi access to help refugees stay in touch with relatives at home and learn new languages. Aid groups provide food, clothing and advice. They organize art classes and ad hoc music performances so these men, women and children can build a sense of community in bleak surroundings. <br><br>But some of those efforts bump into refugee concerns over European Union laws, in particular the Dublin Regulation governing illegal immigration. The law says the country in which an illegal immigrant is caught is recorded as his or her "first point of entry." If you're discovered in Hungary, that's where you have to apply for residency or asylum. And if you're subsequently found in another country, you can be deported to Hungary. <br><br>The Dublin Regulation also specifies that illegal immigrants be fingerprinted and that personal information be stored in an international database. So if you're hoping to eventually settle in the UK, as many of the refugees and migrants in northern France are, you don't want to be fingerprinted anywhere other than Britain. <br><br>Now playing: Watch this: How high-tech hand scanners unintentionally keep refugees... 2:08 Refugees have been slow to overcome associating the container camp's handprint scanner with deportation, says Beatrice Lorigan, a British volunteer who helps provide Wi-Fi to the Jungle from a converted bus. <br><br>"Everybody was really suspicious," she says, a laptop with a cracked screen balanced on her knee.<br><br>Volunteers believe the information stored in the system is separate from the immigration database, but without official confirmation refugees aren't reassured. <br><br>The government in Calais didn't respond to a request for comment. Neither did Zalix, the scanner manufacturer, or Biro, the security contractor. <br><br>'Stop wasting taxes on this bullshit'<br>The container camp has a single entrance. Residents open the hand scanner, which is enclosed in a gray plastic box. They type in an access code and place their hand on a palm reader. <br><br>If the code and print match, the scanner unlocks a turnstile, the kind you see at any major sporting event. <br><br>When we try to take a closer look at the hand scanners, security guards in red Biro Sécurité uniforms warn us not to take photographs. <br><br>Enlarge Image Residents of the government camp use the handprint scanners that control access to the containers. This was as close as we could get before private security guards warned us off. <br><br>Stephen Shankland/CNET The guards and fences look formidable. But around the back of the container camp, refugees have hollowed out a patch of soft sand under the fence and casually slip in and out. <br><br>The hand scanner, guards and fences reflect the authoritarian attitudes of the hard-line Calais government, led by Mayor Natacha Bouchart. Just 20 miles from Dover's famous white cliffs, this busy port is the nearest point to the UK on the European mainland. For more than 15 years, the peaceful countryside has been a bottleneck for refugees and migrants heading to the UK, to the dismay of locals. At the entrance to the Jungle, a squat concrete pillbox is spray painted with English-language graffiti reading, "Stop wasting taxes on this bullshit." <br><br>Some 20 miles east along the French coast, near Dunkirk, authorities in Grande-Synthe have a more sympathetic attitude toward refugees. Here, Mayor Damien Careme has supported humanitarian organizations including MSF and Utopia 56 in building a very different type of community.<br><br>If you are you looking for more info on [https://imvucreditsgenerator.pw/imvu-credits-hack/ just click for source] review our web page.