Immigration Directors meet

The Pacific Immigration Directors Conference (PIDC) was held at the Muri Beach Club HoTel from Tuesday 16 February to Wednesday 17 February 2010. The PIDC is a high level meeting of the regional directors to discuss international best practices on immigration issues.
Chairman Poloma Komiti explained that there are 23 member countries including Australia and New Zealand and has a Secretariat based in Suva. This particular conference is a management board meeting with regional representatives for Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia and management and staff from the Forum Secretariat and Cook Islands has been on the board for 2 years now.
The chairman said PIDC held frequent meetings and workshops on all aspects of immigration policy, practices and legislation in order to keep up with the increased pressures and challenges from all fronts.
Preventing the Pacific from being used as a transit point for the international criminal element on drug trafficking, human trafficking and people smuggling and a host of other criminal activities, has emerged as one of the most important immigration issues for the region.
Protection of our national borders is very important and immigration officers need to be one or two steps ahead of the criminals and that is where the PIDC training has been invaluable to the member countries.
The criminal element are using increasingly sophisticated methods to circumvent immigration laws and this has highlighted the need for strengthening control systems and processes for spotting fake passports and travel permits. This is where the specialized training provided by PIDC into detecting fake documents has been invaluable. For instance, just two weeks ago, nine persons were detained at Suva airport using fake documents.
This is the main reason that the machine readable passports (MRP) have become mandatory because they are harder to fake than the manual version.
Sharing information of those put on an international watch list are also helpful as well as such basic information as the ETA of flights so that the officers can be at the immigration desk or such things as how many passports are likely to be issued.
Other issues include overstayers who come legally but have extended their visit beyond the legal limits of their permits.
Problems can occur in times of national disasters when there can be an influx of officials or international aid workers or volunteers and the criminal element may take advantage of the confusion to slip into the country. According to the international press, this has been suspected especially with regard to the illegal taking of children under the guise of having them up for adoption.
The Secretariat in Suva sends PIDC annual collection plan to members and have six years of valuable information on immigration issues in the Pacific. Right now the Secretariat is sending out the PIDC Annual Collection Plan, and the information collected will be collated.
The data provided will also identify any gaps that may or may not be there for individual countries and used to detect key issues, predict future trends, raise awareness of the issues and how to provide assistance to improve and develop collection and use of immigration data.
The next conference will be held in July and then the annual conference will be held in Vanuatu which will also provide the next chairman of PIDC.
News flash: The PIDC delegates have also made a donation to the Aitutaki fundraising appeal for Araura Enua which was devastated by Cyclone Pat last week.