Visa applications probed from 21 secret countries

Immigration officials are investigating 500 visa applicants who have specialist skills which the Government fears could get into the wrong hands.

TV One last night reported it had papers obtained under the Official Information Act that showed immigration officials were investigating 500 visa applicants as part of an operation targeting 21 unnamed countries.

Immigration Minister David Cunliffe told TV One that a number of people with specialist expertise or disciplines, such as physicists, could have skills "that could, in the wrong hands, be used for WMD [weapons of mass destruction] purposes".

TV One said the work was being done by an immigration profiling group, set up to look at visa applicants from 21 high-risk countries.

The list of countries was being kept secret. Immigration officials were looking at 7500 applications a year from those countries and were turning down a quarter of these, where in the past they had declined one in 10.

National MP Murray McCully suggested New Zealand had been lax in the past over who it let into the country.

"And so we've got people wandering around in New Zealand who would not be allowed in under the criteria today."

Mr McCully said New Zealand had a "big problem in terms of security, particularly relating to terrorism ... ".

Mr Cunliffe said the world had changed and there was a post-September 11 system in place now.

He said the message to those coming to New Zealand was "it pays to be honest, and it pays to come here for the right reasons".

TV One also reported that immigration officials were trawling through 2000 cases a year of migrants from high-risk countries.

It was expected about 360 people a year had been coming in on fraudulent grounds.

The special profiling group was set up last year to handle applications from high-risk countries. In June, Mr Cunliffe said it had reviewed 20,000 decisions.

The minister said at the time that the profiling group had contributed to 22 people being declined visas on security grounds and an increase in decline rates in high-risk countries from 8 to 14 per cent.

- NZPA