Border Control System Research Articles

Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era by Tessa Morris-Suzuki (review)

Reviewed by: Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era by Tessa Morris-Suzuki Youngmi Lim (bio) Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era, by Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xi, 286 pages, illustrations, maps, references, index. $99.00 cloth, $36.99 paper. The year 2012 witnessed increased tensions between South Korea and Japan over the disputed sovereignty of the islets of Dokdo/Takeshima. The generally amicable relationship between the two nations rests on unsettled debates, though. Japan's colonization, war responsibilities, and the territorial sovereignty of Dokdo/Takeshima are the major simmering issues. Regardless of how thoroughly the Japanese have embraced South Korean popular icons, these debates and tensions have had a cooling effect on South Korea-Japan relations. A movement of revisionist history around since the mid-1990s and xenophobic Internet-based activism in the 2000s have vehemently denied Japan's responsibility for war and colonization. Contemporary Japanese anti-Korean sentiments represent the die-hard legacy of colonial and postcolonial racial hierarchies and the bungled handling of postwar and postcolonization political affairs. The surfacing of dormant historical and territorial disputes with South Korea has triggered outbreaks of public displays of anti-Korean racism in Japan. Tessa Morris-Suzuki's 2010 monograph, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era, should interest those who study Korea-Japan relations, the Korean minority population in Japan, and the construction and contour of Japanese and Korean collective identities during a period of aging populations and projected labor shortages in Japan and in South Korea. Scholars concerned with the development of border controls and immigration policy in twenty-first century East Asia will also benefit from Morris-Suzuki's critical analysis of the formative period of Japan's contemporary immigration control. The author presents bottom-up narratives about the effects of Cold War politics on the origins of Japan's post-World War II border control system and individual lives stranded in legal limbo by revisiting the geopolitical conditions of the Korean peninsula and Japan following Japan's defeat and the Allied occupation of Japan and Korea. Placing individual narratives of detained Korean illegal migrants, border-control officers, and policy-makers in the context of broader political and ideological forces when the Iron Curtain was just about to be drawn tight, this volume provides readers with a critical guide to contemporary issues that complicate the relationship between Japan and both Koreas. Based on exhaustive archival research in Japan, Korea, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and Switzerland, as well as in-depth [End Page 149] interviews with undocumented, "irregular," Korean migrants in Japan and secondary sources such as newspaper articles and personal memoirs, Morris-Suzuki elucidates how Japan's contemporary border-control system was established in response to the particular historical circumstances of Cold-War-ridden East Asian geopolitics. She reports on resistance in popular discourse and among policy makers to proposals to overcome Japan's economic malaise through increased immigration (chap. 9). This volume thus situates Japanese border policies in a broader context of the marginalization of ethnic minorities and immigrant laborers so ubiquitously observed during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The immediate postwar period marks a critical juncture: Japan had lost her colonies, including Taiwan, Korea, and the southern half of Sakhalin, as well as the puppet state of Manchukuo. Hastily redrawn national boundaries (pp. 28-32) decisively influenced displaced individuals' fates—especially those of Koreans. Japan's colonial rule had provoked large-scale Korean population movements across East Asia, mainly for survival or Japanese war mobilization, but with the drawing of new borders they often found themselves "stranded on the wrong side of the line" (p. 33). It was part of a vast imposition of impassable national borders drawn between Japan and Korea, Japan and Okinawa, and Japan and China, and between ideologically divided Koreas and Chinas. New borders made the movement across these boundaries impossible for ordinary people. Morris-Suzuki challenges two commonly held assumptions: (1) Japanese exceptionalism among industrialized nations in receiving its immigrant labor force and (2) hierarchical categorizations reflecting contemporary national-border-crossing practices. It has often been assumed that...

New border control system for food originating from third world countries

BackgroundThe global distribution of food products has created a requirement for inspection and testing of imported goods at national and outer European borders. Problems that are generally not encountered with local produce arise when dealing with imports from third world countries. These may include excessive levels of heavy metals, insufficient hygiene, unapproved veterinary pharmaceuticals in animal-derived foodstuffs or excessive levels of pesticides in plant products. The systematic control of imported food and feed is a challenging endeavour. Rigorous testing of imported non-animal food products by the Hesse State Laboratories was introduced in 2007 at Frankfurt/Main airport in order to protect German consumers from these potential health dangers. This ability to monitor imports with the entire personnel and analytical capacity of the Hesse State Laboratory is a new approach in governmental health inspection.ResultsFrom 2007 to 2009, a total of 1,552 food product samples of plant origin were tested for the presence of pesticide residues. Of these, 18% were found to violate maximum residue levels. Thus, the incidence of products from third world countries that do not meet statutory guidelines (EC) No. 396/2005 is approximately twice that of the average for foodstuffs from third world countries tested in other laboratories in Germany. In 10% of the non-compliant samples, the acute reference dose was exceeded by more than 100% and in a few by more than 1,000%.ConclusionsAs a result of the 3-year experience with the "bottleneck control" system at Frankfurt/Main Airport, the Hesse Ministry of Energy, Environment, Agriculture and Consumer Protection has voiced its opinion in the authorisation directive that mandatory prior notification is essential for all non-animal food products imported into the European Union. Only a unified Europe-wide approach can eventually lead to success.

Oracle Multimaster Replication Maintance Optimization

This paper presents a new solution for adding a new database server on an existing Oracle Multimaster data replication system. In normal conditions adding a new database server on this system we cannot insert, delete and update data during this time. So during this time the system is down and we can make only queries. The time for adding the new database server depends on the number of tables on the replication group and on the network conditions. To reduce this time we propose to replace the Replication group in more than one replication group based on logic of database schema. So we will have a replication group for base data, one replication group for most populated tables and another group for non most used tables. Using this method on the Oracle database schema with 250 replication tables and communication speed 1Mbit/s, the time reduced seven times. This research is implemented on border control system (Total Information Management System at Ministry of Interior) in Albania and using this solution we can add or remove replication sites with minimal down time.

A Fast Search Algorithm for a Large Fuzzy Database

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> In this paper, we propose a fast search algorithm for a large fuzzy database that stores iris codes or data with a similar binary structure. The fuzzy nature of iris codes and their high dimensionality render many modern search algorithms, mainly relying on sorting and hashing, inadequate. The algorithm that is used in all current public deployments of iris recognition is based on a brute force exhaustive search through a database of iris codes, looking for a match that is close enough. Our new technique, Beacon Guided Search (BGS), tackles this problem by dispersing a multitude of “beacons” in the search space. Despite random bit errors, iris codes from the same eye are more likely to collide with the same beacons than those from different eyes. By counting the number of collisions, BGS shrinks the search range dramatically with a negligible loss of precision. We evaluate this technique using 632 500 iris codes enrolled in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) border control system, showing a substantial improvement in search speed with a negligible loss of accuracy. In addition, we demonstrate that the empirical results match theoretical predictions. </para>

Tough targets set for VISIT scheme

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released further details on a proposed border-control system that will use biometric technology to authenticate the identities of travellers from countries whose citizens must have visas in order to enter the USA. The plan is ambitious, with the DHS wanting fingerprint scanners in every airport before the end of the year. This is a short news story only. Visit www.compseconline.com for the latest computer security industry news