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Establishing collaboration with Australia in the immigration sector
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Directorate General of Immigration Silmy (right) and Associate Secretary of DHA Stephanie Foster (left) officially sign their collaboration.
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stablished in Jakarta, the Directorate General of Immigration marked a collaboration with the Australian Department of Home Affairs (DHA). The collaboration indicates a step to prepare innovations revolving around the digitalization of the service system and immigration law enforcement.
“Today I have made an official deal with the Australian Department of Home Affairs that is represented by Associate Secretary Immigration Stephanie Foster and her representatives,” stated Silmy after meeting the Australian Immigration delegation at the office of the Director General of Immigration.
In his opening speech on Monday, Silmy unveiled the mission of innovating digitalization. “We followed up on several things, such as shaping a technical group regarding the development of technological information in order to facilitate the exchange of information on architectural systems and immigration for these two countries.”
The DHA perceives the longevity of this collaboration, which brings significance in strengthening the border security of Indonesia and Australia. Several key agreements made in this event touched upon SmartGates access for Indonesian E-passport holders, forensic immigration documents to identify forgery of passports, a border operations center, the Airlines Liaison Officer Program, management of illegal migration and the prevention of transnational crimes on work visas and tourist visas.
Silmy also elaborated on how the immigration was carrying out systematic improvements to support the acceleration of innovation in order to simplify the process for the community. The system of regulation and infrastructure for the implementation of several types of new visas are currently being finalized, which include golden visas, sports visas and diaspora visas.
“We learned a lot from our last visit in Australia last month, which covered the database of foreigners, lists of data alerts to prevent or catch, and other various awakenings that we learned,” explained Silmy.
Silmy told the conference that the Director General of Immigration Office stopped the application of the free-visit-visa for 168 countries and to apply the visa-on-arrival instead, which became one of his learning points from Australian immigration. This lesson disciplines everyone's visas before entering Australia to minimize obstacles within the immigration process.
Stephanie Foster shared her thoughts regarding security borders in Indonesia. “We respond with positivity toward the proposal as well as measures to contain foreigners who are not beneficial to Indonesia in a sense where we push the border forward to protect the borders of the two countries. This is to ensure a minimization of illegal migrations,” she said.
The Australian Immigration also advised Indonesian Immigration to conduct security checks on foreign visitors as soon as possible to prevent persons of concern from entering Indonesian territory.
