By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

lrolle@tribunemedia.net

IMMIGRATION Minister Keith Bell said the immigration department collected nearly $80m in revenue between last July and this March –– the largest in the agency’s history.

“The revenue collected was $79,920,315.92, the largest in our history,” Mr Bell said during his contribution to the budget debate in the House of Assembly yesterday.

“So apart from recruiting the largest number of recruits in the history of immigration, apart from having the largest numbers of repatriations, we also have seen through our improved efficiency the largest amount of revenue collected by the Department of Immigration.”

Despite the revenue record, Mr Bell said his ministry would likely petition Cabinet for more funding to deal with repatriations since his department continues to process “very large numbers” of migrants from Haiti, Cuba and other countries.

He said the department has already deported over 2,500 migrants this year.

“For the first four months of this year, we would’ve repatriated more than half of all of the irregular migrants we did for the entire last year. That is significant,” Mr Bell said. “It is also very, very mind-boggling because of these trends, it means then that in this budget, we have put 1.9 or so million dollars for the repatriation exercise.

“Now last year, we spent $1.9m and if present trends continue, it is likely that we will be coming back to the Cabinet or Parliament for contingency funding for repatriations.”

He said the rise in illegal migration activity is concerning and noted the government would strengthen the Immigration Act.

He said: “Whereas traditionally, we could’ve seen a boat of irregular migrants from one particular country, we are now witnessing significant boatloads of irregular migrants from various countries. In one boatload of persons, persons from Nicaragua, Italy, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic. We’ve never seen this before and so I had a meeting yesterday with the United Nations Human Rights Commission.”

“I also had a meeting last week with the International Organisation for Migration and they have sought to partner with us to ensure that these trends where we see a mixture and a divergence of nationals from various countries that we’re able to seek to address it.”

“It’s something that’s very significant and the IOM and the UNHCR is concerned about it and so they are also working with us to see how best they can address that.”

The increasing number of unaccompanied children found on migrant vessels is another worrying trend, Mr Bell said.

“On one boat, there were 51 children unaccompanied and so it’s a cause of major concern,” he said. “Between the period January to June, some 99 children have been repatriated to their home countries.”