Following the new measures enforced on the pregnant mainland women from February 1, the Immigration Department officers are facing bigger challenges, Director of Immigration Lai Tung-kwok said.

Since the department will be saddled with additional workload after the opening of the Shenzhen Bay and Lok Ma Chau Spur Line Control Points this year, Lai hoped the government would increase the department's manpower and hike officers' salary.

Addressing a year-end press conference yesterday, Lai said the purpose of the new entry arrangement was to ensure proper, priority treatment to local pregnant women.

The new measures also require mainland pregnant women to pre-register for examination with local hospitals before delivering babies in Hong Kong to avoid last-minute admissions through the accident and emergency ward.

Between January 24 and February 6, Immigration officers interviewed 1,219 mainland pregnant women seeking entry to Hong Kong and 60 of them were asked to go back.

Of the 1,159 women who were allowed entry, 60 percent had registered with local hospitals but the rest were nevertheless admitted because they fulfilled the entry conditions.

Correspondingly, the number of last-minute admissions in January 2007 has dropped to 17.8 cases per day compared with 25 cases and 23.4 cases in January and February 2006, respectively.

"There is so far no big problem with the new arrangements, while a few reported cases that mainland women at the advanced stage of pregnancy have entered Hong Kong unnoticed are only individual cases," Lai said. "It is still early to say the new scheme is successful because we need more data to evaluate its effectiveness."

To handle additional workload after the opening of new control points and the new airport passenger terminal, the department needs to employ 500 new staff. And as the new entry scheme for the pregnant mainland women has just begun, it remains to be seen if additional manpower will be needed, he added.

Apart from handling over 200 million passengers through various control points last year, the department also handles a number of special schemes. For the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme which began in June last year, a total of 587 applications were received until the end of 2006. Recently, the concerned advisory committee vetted 96 applications and approved 66 of them to come to settle in Hong Kong.

For the Capital Investment Entrant Scheme, which was launched in October 2003, over 1,900 applications were received by the end of last year and the amount of average personal assets was HK$25.25 million per applicant versus the minimum requirement of HK$6.5 million.

The department also revealed that a total of 15 Hong Kong and eight mainland residents were convicted of bogus marriages between April and December 2006 and the length of sentences ranged from four to 21 months, while 75 such cases are still under investigation.