You can get fake passport for any EU country

[rg1]

From yesterday's BBC1's Panorama,
you can get any EU countries passport for a price £650-£1000 and one can enter UK with those and can claim benefits!!!

This is state of Home Office and they are just screwing up legal highly skilled immigrants!!!

Shame!!!

[pumkin]

From yesterday's BBC1's Panorama,
you can get any EU countries passport for a price £650-£1000 and one can enter UK with those and can claim benefits!!!

This is state of Home Office and they are just screwing up legal highly skilled immigrants!!!

Shame!!!

And it's going to get worse. The British public are understandably going to be up in arms about this and the HO will have to be seen to be taking step on immigration - the easiest target are the legals. So long as the HO can say that they have stemmed the tide of immigration, the British public will be none the wiser (and couldn't be bothered) as to what kind of immigration they are stemming, so long as progress is made. Unless programmes like Panorama point out the true problems.

[Dawie]

What last night's programme demonstrates is the utter stupidity and futility of trying to enforce immigration controls when those controls go totally against economic and market forces.

If something can be created in the first place, it can be forged or copied. Passports and visas are no exception. And when 25 countries come together in a union, there is bound to a few where it is easy to bribe corrupt officials and get a genuine passport.

The fact of the matter is that there is absolutely nothing the UK can do to prevent illegal immigrants from coming into the country. You might as well try to outlaw breathing and eating. This much has been obvious for years and yet governments around the world STILL spend billions and billions of pounds a year to try and prevent illegal immigration. You wonder why they continue to waste this money when it is so painfully obvious that immigration control does not work.

Imagine what better uses all this wasted money could be used for instead of trying to stop something that is so obviously unstoppable.

[OL7MAX]

You wonder why they continue to waste this money when it is so painfully obvious that immigration control does not work.

'Cause they believe there's votes in dem there posturings.

I saw the Panorama programme. They invited the Home Office to have their say; they offered to send someone around to speak with a HO staff/minister but, of course, the HO declined. Hmmm. Are they all busy working on getting the £100K salary approved?

[Dawie]

What I would love to know is what the results would be of a cost-benefit analysis of UK immigration controls.

Are the benefits of trying to stop a few illegal immigrants really worth the unimaginable sums of money being spent on fancy electronic border controls, e-passports and all the other Orwellian "Big Bother" ideas being tossed about.

And then throw in all the unpaid taxes that illegal immigrants aren't paying at the moment (even they would desperately want to) and you realise that these expensive border controls cost more than just the money being spent on them, there's also the opportunity cost of close to a million illegal immigrants not paying any taxes.

[John]

I watched the programme last night. As the programme went on I became more and more amazed that the obvious solution is not in place. Immigration Officers at UK Ports of Entry clearly have the ability to check the validity of British passports, so all we need is a EEA wide computer link, so that any immigration officer has the ability to check not just the passports of their own country, but also link the relevant computer to check the passport issued by other EEA countries.

If that was in place it would instantly put a stop to the trade in forged and stolen EEA passports as described in yesterday's programme.

[OL7MAX]

has the ability to check not just the passports of their own country, but also link the relevant computer to check the passport issued by other EEA countries

With this government's dismal record on IT - if they throw technology at the problem there'll be gridlock at PoE across the country and more, not less, illegal immigration.

Throwing more bureaucracy at the problem won't solve it either. Make forged passports difficult and people will start using genuine passports made out in fraudulent names. How many East Europeans are not planning on coming to the UK - and don't even have a passport? Those are millions of "genuine" passports waiting for a passport photo from someone who has £100 to spare.

The common sense approach is not to put up more No Entry signs. It's to make entry easier. Particularly for people who have something to contribute.

[Dawie]

I agree. In any case, if it was so easy to just create some global super database of stolen and lost passports that anyone in the world could use to authenticate a passport, don't you think they would have done that already?

The truth is that IT projects on that sort of scale are fraught with massive problems. Look at the NHS IT project that failed, and all that was supposed to do was to allow NHS GPs, trusts and hospitals to share medical records with each other. They couldn't even get that right, so how do you suppose they would link together, for example, the 25 countries that make up the EU?

There comes a point where IT and technology just aren't the answers anymore, and when nations and people have to do some serious soul-searching.

The deep soul-searching question that British people who oppose immigration have to ask themselves is simple - is there really an illegal immigration problem, or is the problem with our attitudes?

[JAJ]

I watched the programme last night. As the programme went on I became more and more amazed that the obvious solution is not in place. Immigration Officers at UK Ports of Entry clearly have the ability to check the validity of British passports, so all we need is a EEA wide computer link, so that any immigration officer has the ability to check not just the passports of their own country, but also link the relevant computer to check the passport issued by other EEA countries.

The numbers of reported stolen passports are routinely shared on an international basis. No reason why these numbers should not be loaded into the UK system accessible to British immigration officials.

Fake documents may well have a number that doesn't show up on any blacklist, but often can be detected in other ways, especially by persons who handle passports throughout their working day.

And immigration officials can (and often do) ask a few innocuous-sounding questions to the individual to confirm that they really are who they say they are. It is legal under EU law for British officials to ask questions to confirm the identity of any inbound travellers. It's worth noting that until relatively recently, immigration officials hardly even looked at passports of arrivals with EU member state passports.

Port of entry controls as applied to EU member state nationals will only get stricter, that is for sure. We may also see prison sentences for wilful use of a fake identity document.

The real concern with forgeries is not so much their use at border control posts, where detection expertise is usually high, but rather in dealings with banks, employers, etc. In other words, people entering a country on a legal foreign passport (with visa if necessary) and then using a fake document to overstay and work illegally.

Why is why (IMO) a British national identity card is certainly going to be introduced and will not be repealed even if there is a change of government. While of course any document is vulnerable to forgery, it's generally much harder to use a forged local document as opposed to one from another jurisdiction.

Dawie and others are of course entitled to their opinions, but defeatism does not generally sit well within the British national character.

[OL7MAX]

but defeatism does not generally sit well within the British national character.

That's exactly it! Many Britons consider a more realistic and worldly-wise approach to immigration as defeatism rather than an opportunity to forge a savvy move forward.

Why is why (IMO) a British national identity card is certainly going to be introduced and will not be repealed even if there is a change of government. While of course any document is vulnerable to forgery, it's generally much harder to use a forged local document as opposed to one from another jurisdiction.

I have no confidence that this - or any other UK government - can pull off anything like the ID card (see my comments on govt IT projects earlier). JAJ, if someone coming in on forged EEC documents can legally apply for and use a "local" ID card where is the protection you speak of?

[John]

The numbers of reported stolen passports are routinely shared on an international basis. No reason why these numbers should not be loaded into the UK system accessible to British immigration officials.

That might cope with stolen passports, but it does not cope with fake ones. The live computer link is needed to the relevant national computer in order to ascertain whether the passport is stolen or fake.

[Dawie]

The numbers of reported stolen passports are routinely shared on an international basis. No reason why these numbers should not be loaded into the UK system accessible to British immigration officials.

There is a very good reason they are NOT shared on a regular basis. There are almost 200 countries in the world (actually 193 depending on who you ask). That's 193 countries with a 193 different passports carrying vastly different sets of data. Some countries give their citizens the same passport number for life no matter how many different passports they have, other countries (like mine) give you a different passport number every time you change passports. Some passports have some of the most advanced biometric features yet created, in other passports the bio details of the person are handwritten into the passport and then covered in nothing more than laminate. Some countries have electronic population registers that make it easy to keep track of issued identity documents and passports, other countries still have handwritten registers where it can take months to look up a particular entry.

Keeping track of all the lost and stolen passports in the world is an impossible task.

The real concern with forgeries is not so much their use at border control posts, where detection expertise is usually high, but rather in dealings with banks, employers, etc. In other words, people entering a country on a legal foreign passport (with visa if necessary) and then using a fake document to overstay and work illegally.

Why is why (IMO) a British national identity card is certainly going to be introduced and will not be repealed even if there is a change of government. While of course any document is vulnerable to forgery, it's generally much harder to use a forged local document as opposed to one from another jurisdiction.

Actually I believe the British national identity card will be a great advantage for forgers. All they have to be able to do is to forge one document now that will give them access to everything they want. And don't fool yourself into thinking that it will be difficult to forge or copy a national identity card, no matter how good the anti-forgery features. If the government can source the necessary materials and equipment to produce identity cards and passports then there's absolutely no reason why criminals can't source the exact same materials and equipment to produce these documents.

Dawie and others are of course entitled to their opinions, but defeatism does not generally sit well within the British national character.

There's a thin line between defeatism and realism....ask George Bush. There's absolutely nothing defeatist about admitting that a policy is misguided. This Panorama programme has exposed a problem that has been going on for years and yet there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that these illegal immigrants have compromised national security or endangered the lives of anyone in this country. So what if a few people slip into the country undetected every year on fake passports? So what if there are hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in Britain today? It doesn't effect your life in any way. You have more to fear from local British people.

[OL7MAX]

The live computer link is needed to the relevant national computer in order to ascertain whether the passport is stolen or fake.

When all the national passport databases are linked... boy, that would be a fun system to hack into

Assuming I have only "read" and not "write" authority, have a limit on the number of queries I can perform per originator authentication etc., it would take no more than a few weeks to download the entire database and a day per month to keep the db updated. Now I have the entire data the UK government has access to. Square one.

[JAJ]

There is a very good reason they are NOT shared on a regular basis ...

Keeping track of all the lost and stolen passports in the world is an impossible task.

So what do you think Interpol are doing?
http://www.interpol.int/Public/ICPO/Pre ... 200601.asp

[OL7MAX]

From that page:

While 10 million documents already entered in our database is a significant achievement, we know there are millions more which have not been registered.

Further, they've caught a total of only 2,000 out of those registered 10 million documents - about 500 per year. I wonder what happened to the other 9, 998,000.

[Dawie]

There is a very good reason they are NOT shared on a regular basis ...

Keeping track of all the lost and stolen passports in the world is an impossible task.

So what do you think Interpol are doing?
http://www.interpol.int/Public/ICPO/Pre ... 200601.asp

Yes, and we can all see how well this system works in the Panorama programme.

[JAJ]

Yes, and we can all see how well this system works in the Panorama programme.

It would be interesting to know what the viewing figures were in the Department of Homeland Security in Washington DC.

One of the scenes in the Panorama programme suggested it was (at least in part) filmed in 2004. It is likely that border security has been stepped up since then, although a lot more needs to be done.

Despite rhetoric at the time, the previous government of the mid-1990s had an ineffectual approach to border protection. While the current government of 1997 had an agenda in its early years that positively embraced the idea of near-unlimited migration (and the British community at the time wasn't minded to think otherwise). All that came before the change in direction since 2002 or so.

You don't need to back so many years to see a time when immigration officials at United Kingdom ports of entry hardly even looked at passports from EU member states.

It will still be some time before there are sufficiently robust controls in place at all United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland point of entry, including a more active presumption that passports should be considered fake/stolen unless the Immigration Officer is satisfied otherwise.

That said, having seen the program, I don't think it's all that easy to get hold of a convincing forged/stolen passport. And it would be interesting to know how many people try to get past U.S. border protection officials using a "fake" American passport.


Dawie, your clearly stated views stated are that there should be no immigration controls at all. So it's hardly surprising to see that you would not be prepared to see community resources invested in border protection. But there are some strong reasons why the United Kingdom, like any country, should exercise control over its borders.

I've delving into the realm of anecdotal evidence, but it does seem to be the case that large migrant inflows are generally "good" for the economy in purely numeric terms through increasing the available supply of labour, especially at the lower-skill segment of the market. But at the same time, the anecdotal evidence is that this migration increases competition in the labour market for British citizens and permanent residents with fewer skills, reduces wages and increases social inequality.

That issue aside, uncontrolled immigration prejudices the access of British citizens and permanent residents to scarce social and medical services. It is difficult to see how a universal healthcare system and extensive welfare support network could be sustainable against this background. Plus of course security risks, up to and including terrorism.

Immigration is fundamentally not about figures on the national balance sheet. Ultimately it is a process that leads to the precious gift of British citizenship. Too precious, in my opinion at least, to be given away without consideration or reflection.

[Christophe]

You don't need to back so many years to see a time when immigration officials at United Kingdom ports of entry hardly even looked at passports from EU member states.

That still happens occasionally - not at Heathrow or Gatwick but it has happened to me a couple of times in the past year or so at the Channel Shuttle point of entry (not the Eurostar) and also at London City airport.

Seems like a complete waste of time and money to me: what's the point of employing someone so that everyone can wave their passport covers at him or her? The passport could be expired, or it could be someone else's, not mine, or I even could have my cat's photo in it!