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Illegal immigration to Australia via Jordan down 87.5 percent

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January 17, 2001 

AMMAN-- (AP) - Illegal immigration to Australia through Jordan fell by 87.5 percent last year because of effective Jordanian cooperation, Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock said Tuesday.

He said only 150 people - mostly Iraqis - managed to reach Australia through Jordan last year, compared with 1,200 in 1999.

"That is a very, very significant reduction and it's well beyond reductions achieved elsewhere," he told reporters at the end of two days of talks with Jordanian Interior Minister Awad Khleifat and Foreign Minister Abdul-Illah Khatib.

Ruddock said the reduction was the result of what he called high-level of cooperation between Jordan and Australia in exchanging information.

On Monday, Khleifat, the Jordanian interior minister, said Jordan "is keen to consolidate all forms of cooperation" with Australia and "to fight smuggling in all forms, including smuggling people to other countries through Jordanian territory."

"But this (smuggling) is very rare and the cases that Jordan has dealt with did not exceed a handful," Khleifat was quoted as telling Ruddock.

Asked to comment on Khleifat's remarks, Ruddock said: "We've seen the results in terms of the specific smuggling operations that had been closed down and we've seen the results in terms of the fraudulent documentation that is now being identified."

He declined to elaborate, but said the smuggling operations appear to have shifted to neighboring Syria. He said the problem also persists in other countries like Iran.

On his last visit to Jordan a year ago, Ruddock suggested that 20 Iraqis had been arrested in a police raid on an Amman factory in early 1999. The factory, he said, had produced forged Saudi Arabian passports. Jordanian officials declined to confirm the report at the time.

Jordan hosts an estimated 200,000 Iraqis, many of them seeking visas to Europe, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Some end up traveling illegally through Turkey to Greece and other European nations. Others use Indonesia and Malaysia as an alternative route to Australia.

Australia says more than 4,000 illegal immigrants have arrived in the country in 1999, mainly by sea via Indonesia. Most originate in the Mideast and southern China, it said.

Jordan was the fifth leg of a regional tour that has taken Ruddock to Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Syria and Lebanon. He was scheduled to leave later for Sweden, Switzerland and Britain.