BHX - Immigration Tonight

[martinhardy]

Hi All,

Arrived back from Malaga with Mytravellite, we were early got in at 01:30.
However something odd was happening at immigration, we were made to wait as each passport was checked throughly. It was very odd, ive flown into birmingham on many occasions, and i have never seen anything like it. Especially at this hour of the night. My aircraft was the first to land, and then it was a Mytravel from Monastir. There was 137 on the Lite flight from Malaga (Extremely full that was good to see).

It took 35 minutes to clear the whole aircraft at imigration, and there was te monastir flight queuing and queuing, up the stairs and on to the Main Pier.

Extremely odd!!!!!!

I got to the women at immigration and she scanned my passport barcode, which ive never ever experienced.

Ive always just flashed it as they let me through.

Was good that they did do the checks but, it was wrong to make us all wait so long and only have one immigration official on duty.

I just wondered why this may have been, was there a tip off, just intense screening or what???

Who has the answer????


thanks

Mart

[B737NG]

I have not a perfect answer but just another part to think about:
Why did UK not join the Schengen agreement like the other EU
members?. Then that would be considert as a "domestic arrival"
and you would walk thru. Checks are randomly. The EU is not as bad
as "Themse Maggy" started to make everybody believe.... Tony
talks his mouth off at the moment and there is still a lot of
resistance within the UK.
Participating in a community is not good for an empire but it is
working for ordinary people like me during my travel in Schengen EU.

NG

[Avman]

As one who lives in a country which is part of the Schengen agreement, I have to say that I don't like it! Less border checks makes life a lot easier for criminals and terrorists. So they enter the Schengen area through one of the countries with has weaker immigration checks and then they are free agents. I for one would like to see border controls restored.

[Wee Weasley Welshman]

Hmmmm, international terrorism on the rise, UK a target, European border very porous - and you think we should stop checking people?

Other way around more like. I think the US are building a better system.

Cheers

WWW

[MarkD]

Not just BHX. Had my passport scanned at LHR T1 en route from YYZ to ORK recently. Never before, and meant a long queue in the "EU" section which is never the case usually. In ORK the flash the photo page regime still applies, though that is less surprising given most/all ORK arrivals are from EU states.

[WHBM]

This is being introduced across the country, starting a while ago at Heathrow (phased introduction by terminal there, it seems).

Just that the kit has been installed to read passports automatically. Somewhat pointless having these new machine-readable passports if they are not then read by machines ! Yes it does seem to take longer and shows more officers are required per thousand passengers, which I bet has not been factored in to the project.

Rather demeans the job too, I would think - turns the immigration officer from being someone working on their wits to a machine dolly. I wonder how much of an improvement in detection rates it will give, as the officers were always past masters in spotting the one-in-a-thousand flashed passports with a problem; one picked up a while ago that I had not yet signed my replacement passport. In the USA that would doubtless lead to a body cavity search, but instead he just lent me his pen !