There's been a lot of buzz this week about the long lines at the immigration department, and the hustlers that have begun to take advantage of frustrated customers waiting in extra long lines.
Reports reaching 7News this week were that agents at the department's gates were using traffic cones and bricks to reserve spaces for those customers willing to pay between $50 and $200 dollars.
And the main question was, who would defer their space so that an "agent" who doesn't even work for the department could replace it with a cone?
Well, it seems a lot of people did, and many of other customers went online to complain that though they were the fourth or fifth person in line on a given morning they would later come to find out that they were actually around 22nd in line because all the spaces in front of them had somehow been sold.
It's a phenomenon that the CEO of immigration himself tried to investigate on Wednesday without much luck, but this morning our news cameras took a crack at it and here's what we found out.
Officials in the immigration department also told us that the demand for passports has doubled in 2022 and that at just 6 months into this calendar year they have already printed 22,901 passports, double the amount that had been printed at this time last year, when the count was 11,583.
And, that demand is only worsened by an antiquated and ill-functioning set of machinery currently handling the monumental task of printing passports.
The only silver lining is that this system will be retired in October when a new and more modern system will finally come online.
