MANILA, Philippines - The Bureau of Immigration (BI) advised all travelers on international flights to fill out new machine-readable arrival/departure cards given to them upon arrival in the Philippines or immigration officers will not process their travel documents.
BI Commissioner Marcelino Libanan rushed to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) to see for himself the actual distribution of the new cards.
“I cannot understand why the members of the Airline Operators Council (AOC) did not (distribute) the (new) arrival/departure cards despite (the BI) giving them enough for three months. They did not even load to their aircrafts the new cards,” he said.
Libanan said the new cards are machine-readable and can be filled out within one or two minutes. He added that with the new cards, the BI can gather more information about each traveler, compared to the old cards.
“The threat of terrorism is still very real. We saw there was a recent attempt to bomb a United States airline. That is why it is just right for the Philippines to have a better process of documenting passengers,” he said.
Libanan said the new cards are also used in the US, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
BI’s anti-fraud chief Sammy Vallada said the new cards were launched last June to establish an accurate, timely, efficient and uniform means of recording and retrieving arrival and departure information on passengers.
He said the BI gave the AOC until Dec. 31, 2009 to dispose of the old cards, and the airlines were supposed to use the new cards starting Friday. Vallada added that the AOC members’ country managers were given three months’ supply of the new cards on Dec. 7, 2009.
Libanan said the BI may investigate the country managers for violating immigration rules, adding that they could lose their working permits. “They cannot refuse to follow our laws because the first mandate is the BI, the first line of defense, is to trace bad elements entering the country,” he said.
Vallada said even if the country managers had not sent the new cards to their “inflight operations,” the BI filled airport immigration counters with the new cards.
Teody Pascual, NAIA Terminal 1 immigration supervisor, said the situation will normalize soon. He said BI officials have a meeting scheduled with AOC members on Tuesday to discuss the matter.