e immigration card

Info taken from the Ministry of the Interior's website:

Passports Director-General launches "e-Gate" at KFIA
Saay, 29 October 2011

The director-general of Passports Lt. General Salem bin Mohammed al-Belaihid, has officially launched an "e-Gate" service at King Fahd International Airport (KFIA) in Dammam.

The e-Gate provides a better and speedier service for passengers as verification process is carried out via biometrics (fingerprints, eye images); this technical service aims to speed up the registration of arrivals and departures, and to achieve more control and central follow-up of the entry and exit processes to and from the Kingdom.

The e-Gate card, which is available for Saudi citizens and foreign residents alike, can be obtained free of charge, but it is not a subsute for travel documents.

The introduction of the new system will help facilitate faster and safer immigration at the airports, allowing only five to seven seconds of processing per person at the electronic gate. This will eliminate the need to wait in long queues for an immigration officer to stamp and verify individual passports; instead, to grant clearance, they will now instruct people to swipe their cards at the gates and press their index fingers on panels that will identify the fingerprints.

To obtain an e-gate card, the applicant should first go to the registration table at the airport with a passport photo and the appropriate ideny documents (National ID for Saudis, Iqama for expats). Biometric information will be recorded onto the card (including fingerprints and eye images) and the applicant’s ideny will be validated from the photo before the card is issued.