Gail Alexan­der

The largest num­ber of il­le­gal im­mi­grants to T&T be­tween 2005 and 2009 came from Guyana, Colom­bia, Chi­na and Venezuela in that or­der, ac­cord­ing to fig­ures giv­en by Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Mar­tin Joseph yes­ter­day.

Joseph gave sta­tis­tics on the sit­u­a­tion in re­ply to an Op­po­si­tion ques­tion on il­le­gal im­mi­grants. Joseph said while Im­mi­gra­tion records in­di­cat­ed a grow­ing trend in the num­ber of il­le­gal im­mi­grants de­tained in T&T, the min­istry did not view the present sit­u­a­tion as "an un­con­trol­lable in­flux.'

Fig­ures pre­sent­ed by Joseph showed that il­le­gal im­mi­grants from coun­tries, rang­ing from An­go­la to Zim­bab­we, stood at the fol­low­ing lev­els be­tween 2005 and 2009: 468 ( 2005), 400 (2006), 416 (2007), 873 (2008), 835 (2009).

The high­est to­tal num­ber of il­le­gal im­mi­grants over the five-year pe­ri­od came from the fol­low­ing states:

�2 Guyana – 1,211

�2 Colom­bia – 742

�2 Chi­na – 198

�2 Venezuela – 176

�2 Ja­maica – 116

�2 Nige­ria – 57

�2 Viet­nam – 52

�2 Ghana – 50

Oth­er states had low­er sta­tis­tics or sin­gle dig­it fig­ures.