388 foreigners denied entry in Q1

A total of 388 foreign nationals were barred from entering the country by the Bureau of Immigration (BI) during the first quarter of the year.

Immigration Commissioner Alipio Fernandez Jr. said the number of foreigners sent back to their countries of origin for being either illegal or undesirable aliens represented a 30 percent increase from figures posted during the same period last year.

The BI chief revealed that almost all of the excluded aliens were intercepted at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport while five percent were stopped at the subports in Mactan, Subic, Zamboanga, Davao, Clark and Laoag.

Like in previous years, Japanese nationals believed to be members of Yakuza topped the list of foreigners who were denied entry to the country. A total of 134 Japanese were barred.

Also on the top of the list were Koreans (33), Chinese (32) and Indians (10). All were caught with tampered passports, fake visas and other spurious documents.

The excluded aliens were immediately booked on the first available flight to their ports of origin after the BI issued exclusion orders against them. They were also placed in the bureau’s blacklist.

Fernandez has attributed the rise in number of excluded aliens to the bureau’s intensified campaign against human smuggling through the implementation of stricter procedures in screening foreigners at the arrival area of airports.

"We have been very vigilant in screening passengers as this is in line with our ongoing campaign not only against human traffickers, but also terrorists," the BI chief said.

He noted that immigration officers have also become more adept at detecting fraudulent travel documents with the help of advanced training and modern equipment they had obtained from foreign governments spearheading the global war against terror.

BI records showed that in the same period, a total of 557 departing passengers at airports — mostly Filipinos — were barred from leaving the country. Most of them were "tourist workers" or contract workers claiming to be tourists.