Exploring the decision making of Immigration Officers: a research study examining non-EEA passenger stops and refusals at UK ports RDS OLR 01/07


This report explores the process by which Immigration Officers (IOs) decide whether to hold passengers arriving with non-EEA passports for further questioning, and the possibility of the passenger’s ethnicity influencing this decision. The project comprised interviews with IOs and Chief IOs and a feasibility study monitoring the ethnicity of arriving passengers. A complex interplay of factors was found to account for decisions: intelligence reports; individual passengers’ circumstances; responses to IOs’ questions; and IOs’ judgments about the credibility of a travel scenario. IOs identified economics as an important factor – both the situation in the passenger’s home country and the circumstances of the individual passenger. In contrast, IOs did not consider ethnicity to be relevant. The feasibility study found a higher stopping rate for some non-white ethnic groups. A proportion of this variation was explained by nationality and socio-economic factors rather than ethnicity as such. The study used only a very crude marker of economic status and so it was not possible to determine whether the remaining apparent effect of ethnicity would be explained by economic factors. Refusal rates were similar across all ethnic groups, indicating that IOs appear not to stop a disproportionate number of non-white passengers on relatively tenuous grounds.