The crush of Bermudians rushing into the Office of Immigration over the past few months looking to get new stamps added to their passports has been so overwhelming senior Ministry officials are considering a permanent change to the way the official Register of Bermudians is kept.

The plan under consideration would allow locals to be put on the Register at birth, instead of having to apply for it later in life.

If more people’s names were already in the Register the long lines witnessed day after day in recent weeks would never have happened.

When asked about the influx of people into the Ministry Immigration Permanent Secretary Robert Horton said: “I don’t think any of us could have imagined.”

The United States Department of Homeland Security announced new travel regulations last November, requiring Bermudian travellers to have a valid passport that contains an official Bermuda Status Stamp if travelling after midnight on January 8.

Since that time more than 30,000 Bermudians have filed through the Ministry offices and been issued the new stamp.

That’s an especially staggering number because only about 40,000 people are believed to have a Bermuda passport.

“It surprised me,” said Chief Immigration Officer Dr. Martin Brewer.

“I couldn’t understand why people were coming. It was almost the entire Bermuda population coming in!”

So far the response rate is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 70 percent. “If only we could get this kind of response on other things. It’s a mystery,” said Dr. Brewer.

“Once we recognised the huge demand this made,” said his colleague Mr. Horton, “we offered the Saturday service.”

That service has been in place since late last year and will be available again this weekend (10 a.m. to 2 p.m.), but there have been so many people showing up every other day of the week — the extra day hasn’t really shortened the lines.

“This is redundant, ridiculous, and somebody’s not doing their job - plain and simple.” said Tiffany Swann who was into her fourth hour of waiting to get her passport stamped.

She was one of hundreds at the Immigration Office yesterday trying to beat the Monday deadline.

The process is fairly simple for those already listed on the Register of Bermudians. For them the stamp is basically automatic. Those passport holders got in and out as quickly as 15 minutes yesterday.

But for everyone else, the experience can be excruciatingly long and frustrating, especially because people not on the Register have no idea why their name isn’t there. “Why are we here?” asked Miss Swan, 24.

“I have a Bermudian birth certificate, how do I not have Bermudian status?

“What happened to the records. Why don’t they have them?”

For people in her situation, the rules require she fill out an application for status, produce a birth certificate which shows the name of a parent already on the Register, plus she has to pay $11 as an application fee.

Over a 20-day period at the end of last year the Ministry processed about 2,000 such applications. In the 12 months previous to that they had only processed 1,000. Permanent Secretary Horton acknowledged a lot of people are shocked to learn they aren’t on the Register of Bermudians.

He said: “Until this matter with passports came up, we assumed we were all on the Register. This process revealed many people who thought they were on the list were not on the list.”

That’s why Mr. Horton is among a group of senior Immigration officials looking at the possibility of allowing local parents to put their children on the Register the day their child is born. Currently that is not the Government’s practice.

Mr. Horton cautions however: “The parents will have to demonstrate they are Bermudians.”

That will go a long way to ease the anger of people like Tiffany Swann who spent nearly five hours at the Ministry yesterday. By about lunch time yesterday all ten seats in the Immigration waiting room were taken, there were 23 people standing, and 11 more waiting in the common area just outside the doors of the office.

When stamp seekers arrive at the Immigration Office the first order of business should be a flip through the Register.

But that can be an inexact process because the Register has been used so often, some of the pages are torn or separated or have fallen out of alphabetical order.

“It’s all jumbled!” exclaimed one frustrated page turner.

“I have one word: ridiculous,” said a woman who identified herself as Dawn. “I found my husband’s and my daughter’s name, but I couldn’t find my name,” she said.

The Register is also available at any Post Office island-wide. It is not available online.

Through all the frustration it’s hard to remember that Monday’s deadline really doesn’t apply to everyone.

People who aren’t travelling over the next few weeks, or the next few months, really don’t need to rush.

The stamping services will be available long after Monday, probably available indefinitely.

And even then US-bound Bermudian travellers without a stamp won’t be denied access to America if the stamp is missing from their passports. But they will be required to fill out a visa waiver form. That means many of the people testing the limits of their patience were actually doing so needlessly.