Brent Pin­heiro

brent.pin­heiro@guardian.co.tt

The days of trav­ellers fill­ing out pa­per im­mi­gra­tion forms be­fore ar­riv­ing in T&T will soon be over, as an on­line sys­tem is ex­pect­ed to be in­tro­duced short­ly.

Ac­cord­ing to Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der, some new sys­tems are cur­rent­ly be­ing test­ed, but “[the new] sys­tem will be in­tro­duced in its en­tire­ty in the com­ing weeks”. No ex­act start date for the roll­out was pro­vid­ed.

Alexan­der was speak­ing at a me­dia con­fer­ence on Fri­day at Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah.

On­line ar­rival forms (al­so known as dis­em­barka­tion forms) al­low trav­ellers to pro­vide flight da­ta and pass­port/bio da­ta de­tails up to 72 hours in ad­vance to im­mi­gra­tion au­thor­i­ties for faster pro­cess­ing.

In Jan­u­ary, the Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry list­ed the launch of an elec­tron­ic dis­em­barka­tion card as one of its strate­gic pri­or­i­ties for 2026.

In a re­lease, the min­istry said it would “mod­ernise bor­der en­try and ex­pe­dite pro­cess­ing times”.

How­ev­er, the in­tro­duc­tion of an elec­tron­ic dis­em­barka­tion form to re­place pa­per forms has been promised for a long time. In 2019, then fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert pro­posed the re­moval of ar­rival forms at the coun­try’s two in­ter­na­tion­al air­ports dur­ing his 2020 bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion.

He said, “In an ef­fort to keep up with in­ter­na­tion­al best prac­tice and the ever-chang­ing world of tech­nol­o­gy, I pro­pose to elim­i­nate ar­rival forms at our air­ports. The new sys­tem will re­ly on ad­vanced pas­sen­ger in­for­ma­tion us­ing ma­chine-read­able pass­ports and oth­er ap­pro­pri­ate tech­nol­o­gy. This new pol­i­cy will take ef­fect in 2020”.

Months lat­er, the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic hit the coun­try and T&T’s bor­ders were closed.

Then, in 2024, dur­ing an­oth­er bud­get speech, Im­bert again promised to in­tro­duce a “dig­i­tal on­line dis­em­barka­tion and em­barka­tion card”.

Im­bert said a le­gal team would be­gin work­ing on the frame­work for the forms in 2025. That team would be tasked with, amongst oth­er things, as­sess­ing re­quire­ments, re­view­ing sim­i­lar im­ple­men­ta­tions in oth­er coun­tries, and iden­ti­fy­ing any nec­es­sary leg­isla­tive changes.

The PNM lost the gen­er­al elec­tion be­fore it could take any up­dat­ed leg­is­la­tion to par­lia­ment.

On­line em­barka­tion/dis­em­barka­tion forms have gained pop­u­lar­i­ty across the Caribbean as gov­ern­ments seek to se­cure their bor­ders, while si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly mak­ing trav­el seam­less for pas­sen­gers.

On­line forms are avail­able in coun­tries such as Bar­ba­dos, St Lu­cia, Do­mini­ca, and Guyana.