Sagem Défense Sécurité to manage Bahrain's biometric immigration system
French company will fingerprint foreign workers upon arrival; residency and work permit to be contained within a single card; Middle Eastern biometrics market booms as countries look for ways to manage borders and keep track of foreign laborers
Middle Eastern nations are jumping on the biometrics bandwagon — the market has been estimated at $500 million — and, as many of these oil-rich countries require large numbers of mainly Pakistani immigrants to perform menial labor, immigration control is typically the reason. The latest to take the plunge is the Kingdom of Bahrain, which this week announced that it had selected Paris, France-based Sagem Défense Sécurité (SDS) to provide the country with a turnkey Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). The system will enroll resident workers upon arrival in the country in order to issue them in a one-step process a residency and work permit all on one card, thereby lightening the administrative workload. Under the contract, Sagem Défense Sécurité will install the AFIS, a main control center, a back-up center, and a number of acquisition stations to record data from resident workers upon arrival. These latter centers will rely on SDS’s Morpho RapIDTM terminals and Morpho RapIDTM’s fingerprint sensors.
-read more in this company news release
