Visitors to the UK from South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland will now only be able to travel with a visa.
Visitors will be fingerprinted and checked against watch-lists before being issued with a visa to travel. The new rules were introduced to counter passport and identity fraud, and follow Britain’s first global review of who needs a visa to come to the UK for a short-term visit.
Visa regimes for visitors have now been imposed on five new countries – Bolivia, Venezuela, South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. This follows a global assessment by the Government of all non-European countries to determine the level of risk their citizens potentially pose to the UK in terms of illegal immigration, crime and security.
The roll out of these new regimes began earlier this year with all first-time visitors to the UK from South Africa requiring visas from 3 March, followed in May by the roll out to all visitors from Bolivia and Venezuela. The process is now complete with all visitors from South Africa, plus those coming from Lesotho and Swaziland, requiring visas to travel.
Nationals from more than 100 countries now require a visa, and the UK Border Agency has already collected more than four million fingerprints from people applying for visas worldwide.
Border and Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said:
“Already our shake-up of border security is delivering results, with fingerprint visas helping us catch thousands of people trying to hide their true identity or a criminal past.
“Today sees visa checks come into effect in the remaining countries that failed to pass our strict visa waiver test.
“I am determined that the UK Border Agency should continue to strengthen the border and 2009 is the year of delivery. As well as applying greater scrutiny to visitors, we are being more selective about who can work in the UK and coming down hard on rule breakers.”
The widening of the visa net was just one of a raft of measures the UK Border Agency committed to delivering in 2009. In February, the Home Secretary pledged to make a number of changes – and already many of these have successfully taken place.
A commitment to increase detention space saw the opening of the 426-bed immigration removal center Brook House. This facility near Gatwick Airport will allow the Government to continue to remove record numbers of foreign lawbreakers from the UK – with the Government vowing to send home a further 5,800 by the end of this year.
By tightening the points based system the Government has ensured migration matches the country’s needs during these hard economic times. Employers must now advertise all skilled ‘tier 2’ jobs to resident workers through JobCentre Plus before they can bring people in from outside Europe.
The Government has also toughened the criteria against which highly skilled migrants seeking entry to the UK are judged – raising the qualifications and salary level required for highly skilled workers to a Masters degree and a minimum salary of £20,000.
The first six months of the year has also seen the creation of a multimillion pound fund to reduce the impacts of migration on local services, the rolling out of new technology to protect Britain’s border from smuggling and new rules to make it easier than ever to remove European criminals.
Source: Home Office
Net News Publisher for World News
