On August 30, at a press conference about the revised Immigration Law project, a representative of the Immigration Department (Ministry of Public Security) said that Vietnamese citizens with chip-embedded passports can immediately use them to pass through this gate.

On the exit side, this system currently only allows Vietnamese people to have diplomatic or official passports.

For foreigners exiting the country, Autogate only applies to cases of permanent or temporary residence card, issued by a competent authority in Vietnam.

Particularly for citizens under 14 years old, they are not currently allowed to use Autogate, because this system operates on a one-by-one check-in basis and passengers must be tall enough to be identified.

According to the Immigration Department, passengers when completing entry and exit procedures using Autogate will not waste time waiting in line to give their passports to the airport border police to manually enter information, solving the problem.

Passengers pass through Autogate gates at Tan Son Nhat airport.

Passengers using Autogate will have to go through two layers of doors.

The Immigration Department said the Autogate system can accurately identify the passport and its user.

As of August 30, there were 750,000 people eligible to use the Autogate portal and the authorities had handled 30,000 Vietnamese citizens and foreigners exiting and entering the country through this portal.

Why increase the visa issuance period to 90 days?

The Law amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Law on Entry and Exit of Vietnamese Citizens and the Law on Entry, Exit, Transit and Residence of Foreigners in Vietnam, takes effect from May 15.

Accordingly, the Government issues electronic visas (e-visa) to citizens of all countries and territories in the world instead of only 80 countries and territories as before.

Explaining this change, a representative of the Immigration Department said that the old regulations (e-visa is valid for 30 days and can only be entered once) has caused inadequacies for foreigners who want to enter the country.

Leader of the Immigration Department at the press conference on August 30.

In addition, the temporary stay period is also increased from 15 days to 45 days for citizens of 13 countries where Vietnam is unilaterally exempted from visas, including: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The Immigration Department added that the new law also abolishes the requirement that passports must be valid for 6 months or more.

From August 15 to 30, the police of international airport border gates processed exits for nearly 200 Vietnamese citizens using ordinary passports with a validity of less than 6 months.

Pham Du