Jamaicans Warned not to Apply for New Passports if Visa Requests are Denied

Director of Passport Services, Hugh Thomas is advising members of the public who have been refused foreign visas, not to apply for new passports to disguise this fact.
“I just want to appeal to persons that it makes no sense to get a new passport if you were refused entry in any country, or you were denied a visa, because [when] you get another passport, all you have done is to change the passport number. They have their records, and they check, so you are just wasting your money,” he stressed.
Mr. Thomas made the appeal at a recently held JIS ‘Think Tank’, held at the agency’s head office in Kingston.
He also added that the Immigration, Citizenship and Passport Division, more popularly known as the Passport Office, has a system in place that enabled them to detect when such incidents occur. The Director further noted that under the new computerized system, preparing a second passport required that the previous passport be deactivated.
Mr. Thomas informed that the Passport Office applied a three-month waiting period after the reported loss of a passport, as sometimes these passports are subsequently recovered. He pointed out that if there was an urgent need to travel, the Office was able to respond to such special cases.
He used the opportunity to appeal to those holders of machine readable passports to take care of them. “I guess because they are much smaller than what we are used to, they end up in the washing machine. They are important documents, take care of them,” he stressed.
The Director also reminded that in light of the current hurricane season, these documents should be kept in a plastic bag for protection.