Yes­ter­day's an­nounce­ment by the Unit­ed King­dom gov­ern­ment that it was im­pos­ing a visa re­quire­ment on all T&T na­tion­als seek­ing to en­ter the UK would have come as a sur­prise to the hun­dreds of Trin­bag­o­ni­ans who vis­it friends and fam­i­ly or do busi­ness in that coun­try an­nu­al­ly.

T&T now joins 67 coun­tries whose na­tion­als are re­quired to ap­ply for visas to en­ter the UK. That in­cludes many na­tions in Africa and Asia, and Ja­maica and Do­mini­ca in the Cari­com re­gion.

In ex­plain­ing the de­ci­sion of his gov­ern­ment in a short so­cial me­dia video yes­ter­day, British High Com­mis­sion­er to T&T Jon Dean said in any coun­try, bor­der se­cu­ri­ty has to be a pri­or­i­ty.

"We reg­u­lar­ly re­view our visa and im­mi­gra­tion poli­cies to en­sure they re­main ef­fec­tive. On this oc­ca­sion, there has been a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in the num­ber of un­jus­ti­fied asy­lum ap­pli­ca­tions by Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­als at the UK bor­der," said the UK's rep­re­sen­ta­tive in this coun­try.

"Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the ac­tions of a small mi­nor­i­ty have meant that our min­is­ters have had to take the dif­fi­cult de­ci­sion to in­tro­duce a visa re­quire­ment," he added.

A re­port in the British Dai­ly Mail yes­ter­day in­di­cat­ed there had been a sharp in­crease in the num­ber of asy­lum ap­pli­ca­tions from T&T. The num­ber went from an av­er­age of 49 a year be­tween 2015 and 2019 to 439 claims in 2024.

While the tra­jec­to­ry of asy­lum ap­pli­ca­tions from T&T may seem alarm­ing to the British au­thor­i­ties, an of­fi­cial March 5 re­port from the UK Par­lia­ment in­di­cates that in 2024, 84,200 ap­pli­ca­tions for asy­lum were made in the UK, which re­lat­ed to 108,100 in­di­vid­u­als. 

If the news­pa­per re­port is ac­cu­rate, T&T na­tion­als ac­count­ed for about half of one per cent of all the asy­lum ap­pli­ca­tions in the UK.

Mr Dean al­so re­ferred to a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in the num­ber of "un­jus­ti­fied asy­lum ap­pli­ca­tions" from T&T. If Great Britain's top diplo­mat here can as­sert that many of the T&T asy­lum seek­ers to the UK are "un­jus­ti­fied," that should mean the bor­der con­trol au­thor­i­ties there would not have too much dif­fi­cul­ty in deny­ing those ap­pli­ca­tions, af­ter fol­low­ing due process.

Asy­lum is de­fined as the pro­tec­tion giv­en by a coun­try to some­one flee­ing from per­se­cu­tion in their own coun­try. T&T na­tion­als mak­ing asy­lum ap­pli­ca­tions in the UK must have "a well-found­ed fear of be­ing per­se­cut­ed for rea­sons of race, re­li­gion, na­tion­al­i­ty, mem­ber­ship of a par­tic­u­lar so­cial group, or po­lit­i­cal opin­ion," ac­cord­ing to the de­f­i­n­i­tion of a refugee found in Ar­ti­cle 1 of the 1951 Unit­ed Na­tions Con­ven­tion and Pro­to­col Re­lat­ing to the Sta­tus of Refugees.

Giv­en the ro­bust­ness of T&T's democ­ra­cy and the mul­ti-cul­tur­al na­ture of the so­ci­ety, we think very few, if any, of the 439 T&T claimants to UK asy­lum sta­tus could jus­ti­fi­ably claim they have a well-found­ed fear "of be­ing per­se­cut­ed for rea­sons of race, re­li­gion, na­tion­al­i­ty, mem­ber­ship of a par­tic­u­lar so­cial group, or po­lit­i­cal opin­ion."

Gen­er­al­ly, the T&T na­tion­als ap­ply­ing for asy­lum in the UK are not ar­riv­ing on British shores in tiny, crowd­ed boats. They are not flee­ing a coun­try whose neigh­bour has waged an "un­jus­ti­fied" three-year war against them. They are fly­ing to the UK aboard a com­fort­able Air­bus or Boe­ing air­craft, for which they would have paid thou­sands of TT dol­lars. The UK gov­ern­ment should re­quire those ap­pli­cants, there­fore, to use their re­turn tick­ets.