UK Immigration Service

Immigration Officers enjoyed an annual salary of between £200-300 and controlled passengers and seamen at ports throughout the United Kingdom.

By the late 1950s, the numbers of arriving passengers at airports overtook that of seaports for the first time and the distribution of staff began to reflect this.

During the 2000s new technologies opened up opportunities to create a new "flexible" border control that better focussed its resources on high risk passengers.

The enforcement arm developed slowly in the 1980s and 1990s but, in the 2000s, underwent a transformation in terms of its remit, training and powers and, by 2006, removed more in-country offenders than were refused entry at UK ports for the first time.

The practicalities of assessing large numbers of people arriving at ports mean that a great deal of discretion is given to the immigration officer, (although less now than was once the case).

[5] The idea that a relatively low ranking officer merely has to satisfy himself or herself as to the person intentions rather than prove an offence, as is the case in criminal matters, is a long-standing cause of legal and legislative tension.

[6] The work of a port based immigration officer is to sift arriving passengers to detect those whose accounts of their intentions give some cause for concern.

If the officer is satisfied they will stamp the passport with one of a variety of wordings, (conditions), depending on the reason for the persons stay and apply a time limit according to pre-set criteria.