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.