JAMAICA deports an average of five illegal immigrants per month, immigration officials said Friday, but with no centralised system to track visa issuances and travel permits, the country has no idea how many undocumented foreigners live and work here.

"We are trying to come up with some figure for how many illegal persons we have here," said Leighton Wilson, director of immigration.

"It used to be ignored to some degree, and there wasn't much emphasis placed on it," he said, adding that the issue has turned into a big problem for Jamaica, and will require immediate and concentrated effort.

The immigration division of the national security ministry, under its new drive to quantify and address the problem of human trafficking here, is now reviewing the system of visas, and is tracking entry records to see if it can trace immigrants who may have settled here without permit.

But for now, says Wilson, Jamaica has no clear monitoring system in place to identify foreign visitors, their origin and whether they overstay.

"With the whole consciousness of migration and human trafficking, it is an area that we are looking at - to have a more scientific approach as to what figures to come up with," he told the Sunday Observer.

The tracking of visitors will be easier, he said, now that an electronic border management system, which captures data on arriving and departing travellers, is in place at the two international airports - Sangster in Montego Bay, and Norman Manley in Kingston.
The ministry, he said, is more worried about the cost of tracking those who sneak in illegally.

Jamaica requires nationals from some 112 countries to enter on visas. Haiti was the only Caricom member country on the visa list supplied to the Sunday Observer by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade.

Cayman Island, an associate member of Caricom, was added this year in retaliation for imposing visa restrictions on Jamaicans. Colombia was dropped from the list in January after the two countries agreed to expand their relations and areas of cooperation.
Legal migration to Jamaica has climbed from 6,765 in year 2000 to 8,239 in 2004.

But if the figures for deportees are dropped from the count, then legal migration has actually dipped: from 5,280 to 4,013 in the five-year span.

Wilson said that 90 per cent of visas are issued by Jamaican missions and embassies overseas, for which there is no centralised reporting system.

"You will hear significant variation in numbers that are coming in but it is just a difficult task" to track visitors, he said, linking it to resource constraints.

In many instances, he said even though the visas have been issued, the applicants sometimes never travel on them.
"We are trying to put a system in place to account for them much better and to ensure that the reporting from the various consulates takes place on a more timely basis," he said.

The four to five illegals deported monthly are mostly nabbed, by chance, in police stings or routine traffic checks.
"Both develop and developing countries are unable to find the resources to properly monitor such a thing," said Wilson.
In the United States, for example, a country of almost 300 million, illegal immigrants are estimated at 11 million.

In Jamaica: "Most of the time, the persons who are deported are those whose status were discovered if they have committed criminal acts or involved in simple violation or through a routine police check," said Wilson.

He made reference to the recent arrest of a Haitian national living illegally in Portland since 2004, who was discovered in routine spot check by the police.

Jamaica has long emerged as a panoply of cultures with distinct populations of Africans, Indians, Chinese and other Asians, and more recently Latin Americans and eastern Europeans who often work in the clubs - making it difficult to pinpoint those who are illegals.

Wilson said the more difficult task is detecting those who enter illegally at unpatrolled sections of the coast - the method most used by Haitians, for example, who come intermittently by the boatload.

There is also no available data on the origin of illegal immigrants, nor the numbers who use Jamaica as a jumping off point to other countries. Wilson said that so disjointed is the data that often Jamaica only discovers the illegals long after they have left for other shores or having self-repatriated.

Jamaican visas are issued manually, making it difficult to calculate just how many have been granted in the various countries, said the immigration director.

Explaining just how the system works, Wilson said, foreign nationals would apply for a visa in their country to enter Jamaica.

"If the Chinese are coming for employment or to peruse the possibility of investment, then they would come in as a visitor and they would examine the whole possibility and then if they see the prospect right then they make the formal application to set up the business," he said.

The granting of work permits falls under the ambit of the Ministry of Labour.
"That person should have obtained the work permit before coming to Jamaica and that applies to all non-commonwealth nationals," said Wilson.

"We really don't have anything to do with it. Our main thing is to see that when the person comes to us that they are legally in Jamaica."
But securing a work permit does not give the applicant automatic right to remain in the country. That has to be approved by the immigration department.

Outlining a scenario, Wilson said: "Let us say the time of that person's visit expired in January, but they obtain a work permit in May. They turn up at the office in June very confident that everything is okay now but it is not, because the work permit does not cover the period they were in breach."

However, such cases are treated on merit, which means the person in breach is likely to be granted an extension of their stay in the island.

For persons wishing to acquire Jamaican citizenship, Wilson say they either have to be married to a Jamaican; live here for five continuous years; or be of Jamaican parentage.

browni@jamaicaobserver.com

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