THE ISLAND'S two international airports - Sangster, Montego Bay, and Norman Manley, east Kingston - is to have an electronic border control system in place by 2004 as part of the Ministry of National Security's drive to improve immigration systems.
According to Carol Charlton, Senior Director of the Min-istry's Immigration, Citizen-ship and Passport Division, the computerised system swipes passports and functions by "storing information on the passport holder, the length of their stay, the location they stayed at and the frequency of their travel". The system is in use throughout the world and should be operational in Jamaica within a year.
In other changes to immigration procedures, members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, who had previously operated as immigration officers under the control of the Commissioner of Police, will be partly replaced by civilian immigration officers at the two international airports.
"We will still have a police component that will be concerned with investigative and enforcement measures," Ms. Charlton stated.
Measures are also in place to tighten up document fraud in passport applications, with the introduction of stamp-approved, machine-readable documents, the training of staff to identify false documents and close scrutiny of all documents being touted as key elements in the crackdown.
However, according to Lincoln Downer, customer service manager at the Division, identity theft was still a problem with persons carry genuine documents which are theirs.
"We have to ensure that what comes in (as documents) is genuine so that when the document is produced, it really belongs to the holder so it really is a bona fide document," he stated.
