1) It is none of your business, and feeding others has a similar effect to killing others in the sense that you’re taking on a bigger role than what people wish of you. After all, the country’s leaders should be responsible enough to work through it on their own.

2) You may well be feeding a corrupt government. Even if you did get the money to the right place, this simply eases the burden on the government in that country, which may get even more corrupt as a result of your actions.

etc.

The main point is, it’s not “core business” for a government to be worrying about other countries. It should expend effort on keeping it’s own country in good nick, that’s hard enough. Therefore, when writing a law for gambling, make sure you protect your own citizens, and don’t create extra work. If another country asks you to stop an Australian gambling website, and you’re on good terms with that country, it may be advisable to assist them, but you shouldn’t have laws enforcing this stuff, because presumably other countries will have these laws.

Further to this, another country may well have decided that gambling is fine. Creating laws that prevent Aussie websites from competing in these markets is morally egotistical. “I won’t let my people give you what your people want (and think is perfectly fine) because I think it’s wrong.” The fact that it will actually bring in money to your country is a side-effect, and even if no actual money was made, it wouldn’t matter. It’s really just a separation of concerns.

By contrast, fingerprinting foreigners requires effort to purposely make life difficult for people coming into your country. Like you’ve said, you’ll be tied to whatever the country wants to do with your private data without your consent or your ability to do anything about it (short of starting a war or something). Further to this, if you think about the separation of concerns above, America really shouldn’t be interested in protecting people who aren’t their citizens, so won’t really do anything about keeping their private details private.

Fingerprints may be stolen or leaked and may be used to gain access to a variety of things in different countries, and America has no incentive to care. That’s the scary thing.

But that’s not accurate, because it relies on the false assumption that fingerprinting is not already used on US citizens. In fact, fingerprinting is commonly used for drivers licenses in some (most?) states, gun licenses, and other government interactions. So if you make the (admittedly gross) assumption that most visitors will be driving cars, the fingerprinting requirement simply brings them up to parity with most US citizens who drive.

So I object to the policy of fingerprinting immigrants because

a) The practice is of such questionable utility,
b) It is at odds with the inclusive and accepting history of the country (“give me your huddled masses”),
c) There is not the accountability that the data will be kept private and very little recourse in the event that it is misused, and
d) It just *feels* bad.