Migrant registration to start next week

The Gov­ern­ment will be­gin reg­is­ter­ing all un­doc­u­ment­ed mi­grants in Trinidad and To­ba­go from next week Fri­day un­der a new Mi­gra­tion Reg­is­tra­tion Frame­work, Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der an­nounced to­day.

The reg­is­tra­tion will ap­ply to all un­doc­u­ment­ed mi­grants, re­gard­less of na­tion­al­i­ty, and will be con­duct­ed un­der the Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Min­istry of De­fence.

The process will be­gin with on­line reg­is­tra­tion at mi­grantreg­is­tra­tion.gov.tt. Ap­pli­cants will then be sched­uled for an in-per­son in­ter­view, af­ter which they will re­ceive a Mi­gra­tion Reg­is­tra­tion Frame­work card. In-per­son reg­is­tra­tion is ex­pect­ed to be­gin af­ter Car­ni­val.

Alexan­der said the reg­is­tra­tion will take place at sev­er­al gov­ern­ment fa­cil­i­ties, in­clud­ing the Lar­ry Gomes Sta­di­um in Ari­ma, the Ato Boldon Sta­di­um in Cou­va, the Hasley Craw­ford Sta­di­um in Port of Spain and the Dwight Yorke Sta­di­um in To­ba­go.

A reg­is­tra­tion fee of $700TT per per­son will be charged, ex­clud­ing chil­dren. The to­tal cost of the pro­gramme is pro­ject­ed at $1 mil­lion, sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er than the $5 mil­lion spent dur­ing the pre­vi­ous reg­is­tra­tion ex­er­cise in 2019, due to the use of ex­ist­ing gov­ern­ment fa­cil­i­ties.

Alexan­der said the par­tial­ly dig­i­tal sys­tem is in­tend­ed to im­prove ac­count­abil­i­ty and da­ta ac­cu­ra­cy, while al­so al­low­ing mi­grants the op­por­tu­ni­ty to work legal­ly in Trinidad and To­ba­go. He warned that un­doc­u­ment­ed mi­grants who fail to reg­is­ter and are lat­er found by au­thor­i­ties could face im­me­di­ate de­por­ta­tion.