Doing nothing is better than expensively doing nothing
"Or we could just pretend that there's no such thing as organised crime, smuggling, large scale identity fraud, unrestricted criminal movement, drug trafficing, child abduction, sex slavery, money laundering and of course terrorism"
That's not the real position though. The alternatives are spend a massive amount of public money on making the situation *worse* with governments' phony silver bullets like poorly implemented biometrics, or keep on looking for a solution that inevitably won't be capable of being packaged in a simple way to sell to the public. But unfortunately governments need to look like they're doing something more than they need to actually achieve their goals.