Under the headline “Deception helps illegal immigrants sneak into EU” Dutch newspaper NRC published an intersting article by Freek Schravensandeon it’s website. It gives you an idea of what you can expect if you try to pass the Dutch border.

The frontline: Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.

Illegal immigrants and Dutch customs officials are caught in a game of cat and mouse.    Some of them might suddenly change queues, taking their chances with an official that looks more lenient. Others may come down the escalator as a group, only to split up as soon as they enter the customs officials’ line of sight. Sometimes a sloppily done necktie or a pair of white sneakers under a black suit will give them away. Sometimes the question “what is your passport number?” will. If they proceed to rattle it off, they have fallen for it, Erwin Rasterhoff, a customs official at Schiphol airport explained. “Nobody knows their passport number by heart.” It is a game of cat and mouse. Schiphol is the main battleground in the constant struggle between the Royal Marechaussee, the Dutch branch of the military responsible for protecting the nation’s borders, and the illegal immigrants, mostly Asian or African, trying to gain access to the European Union using fake passports. Last year, 600 would-be immigrants fell prey to the cat. How many mice got away is unknown. What is certain is: the rules of the game change constantly.

Customs officials practise what is known as profiling. They use tactical tricks. For instance, they try not to look only at the traveller standing at their counter, but eye the one behind him as well. They ask questions, like “What is your destination?” They scan passports, finger them, drop them. Fakes feel different, sound different when they land on the floor, and are rougher along the edges.  Some illegal immigrants like to bluff. They have multiple fake stamps in their passports, to establish their assumed identity as a business traveller. When they fear exposure is inevitable, they often try to flirt with the customs official, or make a scene. “Why did you pick me out of the line? Because I’m black?” is an oft-used line, Rasterhoff said.  If the veracity of a passport is questioned, it is submitted to the National Documents Bureau at the airport. Here, analysts look for pockets of air beneath the passport’s picture, indicative of photo swaps. The watermark is scanned under ultraviolet light, printing techniques and glue remnants are scrutinised and visa numbers studied. Since many countries still refuse to invest in secure passport technology, it is often impossible to determine whether a passport is genuine with 100 percent certainty.

Prize finds from the past line the bureau’s Wall of Fame. The wall displays 28 passports all bearing the same name (Cherif, a 43-year-old from Guinee) but different photographs. “A good forgery, technically speaking. Probably made with inside help,” said Gert Penterman, chief of the bureau. The 28 illegal immigrants carrying the passports arrived into the country over the course of six weeks, only to fall into the hands of the authorities.  The wall is also donned with more fanciful documents. Passports of the nonexistent nation of British Honduras are a regular catch, Penterman said. A passport belonging to a German man who had proclaimed his own kingdom in Ghana, dubbed Lichtenberg, and made his own passport. “The Ghanaians had even stuck a visa sticker in his passport.” A large blue passport with golden letters reading “World Passport.” Stupid mistakes abound, like blatant spelling errors, or the birth dates of a woman’s two children: October 9 of 1988 and March 17 of 1989.  There are services in China that will replicate any passport within a week, Rasterhoff said. But for many illegal immigrants, time is of the essence. This is why a lot of forgeries are not very convincing. Forging passports has also become more difficult thanks to technological advancements like the built-in chip or the digital photograph, which are now common in the most coveted of passports, those of EU countries.

This has led illegal immigrants to try their luck another way: through lookalike fraud. Criminals buy a real, stolen passport on markets in China or Pakistan and look for a prospective immigrant who looks like its previous owner. If need be they will outfit the new bearer with a moustache or glasses to match. Of the 600 suspected illegal immigrants apprehended last year, 134 were arrested because they bore insufficient likeness to the pictures in their passports.  Catching lookalikes is difficult, Penterman explained. “White people are good at keeping other white people apart. But Chinese, Japanese and West Africans are more difficult for us. Besides, faces can change a lot over the years.” When examining a face, Penterman tries to focus on the extremities: the nose, with or without a stub, the space between the nose and the upper lip and the ears. “The ear is our best fingerprint,” Penterman said “It never changes”.  If officials catch a suspected lookalike, they first take a picture that is then compared to the one in his or her passport with the naked eye – no technology exists that can do the job yet. If the traveller’s true identify remains uncertain, the suspect is questioned and frisked. If customs official still can’t make up their minds thereafter , they put the matter to a vote. “An independent one,” Penterman said. Often, cases remain undecided and are passed on to a judge.

The criminals orchestrating the identify fraud are rarely caught, Penterman said. “We deal with a lot of cases involving human trafficking, but if we catch someone they often claim not to know anything. ‘I found this passport at the station,’ is a story we hear a lot. When people say that, we know they are carrying out the instructions of a smuggler.”  On rare occasions, one is apprehended. The officials once arrested a smuggler in Schiphol’s transit area, carrying multiple South Korean passports, a country for which no visa requirement exists to enter the Netherlands. The passports were destined for Chinese supposedly just passing through Schiphol on their way to another destination. After a quick swap in the airport’s toilets however, they would have been on their way out of the airport.  Sometimes customs officials catch a group of illegal immigrants with consecutive ticket numbers, all carrying the same phone number with them. Or a passenger will linger in the transit area for a long time after a flight, a telltale sign that he may be the ringleader of people smuggling ring.  On flights deemed high risk, passengers are checked immediately after arriving at the gate. Three men stand guard at the plane’s jet bridge while an undercover scours through the lounge, on the lookout for smugglers awaiting their human contraband there. Gateside inspections prevent illegal aliens from straying through the transit area for two weeks before finally applying for asylum.  Once an immigrant is arrested, a jail cell awaits them. Any children he or she may have are temporarily placed in foster care. After a return flight has been arranged, the illegal immigrant is confined to Schipol’s deportation centre. Combs and razors are confiscated to prevent automutilation or worse. A lot of deportees do not return home quietly. None of them want to go back where they came from. Often, an entire village will has saved money to send one of its finest sons or daughters to Europe to make some money.