Bill extends tenure of immigration trio

Check out the mandatory retirement dates of present Supreme Court justices on their 70th birthdays. Inclusive of the May 17 departure of Chief Justice Puno, the next President will get to appoint only four justices until 2016. Gloria Arroyo’s 11 appointees will dominate. Worse if, despite the election ban, she names Puno’s successor from among her loyalist-justices, then inserts yet another one to fill up the 15-man Court. She will continue to control it way past her term. If she becomes Speaker, she can even have the President and VP impeached, with her Chief Justice appointee heading the Senate trial. If the two are ousted from office, senators and congressmen will have to elect an Acting President from among them.

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Only last Jan. 2 a new international passenger arrival-departure card was put into use. Photos of President Gloria Arroyo and immigration head Marcelino Libanan dominate the backside. It gives the impression the two may not be stepping down when they should on June 30.

In fact, they won’t. Using public funds Arroyo is on a congressional run, in order to become Speaker and then Acting President. As for Libanan, a bill quietly has been slipped into Congress to extend his term for three long years.

The Immigration Reform Bill ostensibly would clean up the rotten Bureau of Immigration. All personnel would be fired as the agency is transformed into a pristinely new Immigration Authority. There’s a catch, though. Section chiefs, meaning, some of those partly to blame for the BI’s dirt all these years, will stay. So will the incumbent commissioner, Libanan, and his two associate commissioners. They are the presidential appointees who should have curbed internal corruption but failed, and so undeserving of rewards. But the bill treats them special. Not only will they become three-year tenured director-general and deputy directors-general. They also will assume the new posts after collecting retirement pay from the defunct BI. To top it all, they will have the last say on whether to rehire the BI’s good and bad eggs.

No longer will immigration be supervised by the Dept. of Justice. The Authority will be a super-body, usurping the powers even of Congress, the judiciary, and the foreign office. Naturalizing aliens, issuing visas, and fixing fees will become its daily functions. The director general will have clout to determine probable cause, and issue arrest and search warrants. He can also charge overtime fees from airlines and shipping lines, with discretion to spend it at will.

If Congress passes the bill during these last two weeks of session, it might be breaking the law. The Omnibus Election Code bars appointment or transfer of any public official to any post during the campaign period. Passage also will pre-empt the next President from naming a trustworthy immigration boss. He will be stuck with Arroyo’s men. The new director general and deputies will be shielded from present Ombudsman inquiries.

There’s a strong lobby for the bill. It was rushed in the House and is now being shepherded in the Senate allegedly by influential immigration fixers, mostly from Chinatown. The human smugglers aim to prolong their old BI cohorts in power. They make a killing, charging P300,000-P500,000 per visa extension. Sometimes they sell the same visa over and over to up to 20 alien Chinese. That’s why in criminal cases, say narco-trafficking, there are that many suspects with the same name too. The racketeers also serve as Customs facilitators. Watch them in action whenever a flight from China comes in.

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A letter from a ship owners’ union led the Philippine Ports Authority unilaterally to defer anew modernizing the Manila pier. The Philippine Liner Shipping Association had asked PPA boss Oscar Sevilla to defer by a month last Jan. 15’s takeover by the rebuilding contractor. Sevilla granted it the day before. Not consulted, the Manila North Harbour Port Inc. is contesting the postponement, from which it is losing P2 million a day (Gotcha, 18 Jan. 2010).

The ship owners’ leader Daniel Lacson invoked old “habits” of their customers (cargo shippers) to justify the delay. He acknowledged that the MNHPI had been meeting with individual shipping companies since mid-Dec. for “smooth transition.” But he said they needed more than just one month to get shippers used to MNHPI’s new system.

For one, Lacson said, “cargo owners are of the habit of delivering their outbound cargoes a few days early and withdrawing their inbound cargoes a few days after arrival. To give them time to adjust to the new operator’s system, PLSA requested that the free storage be set at 6 days for a period of 30 days from 15 Jan. This was denied by MNHPI.”

MNHPI for its part protested that it was all set to deploy manpower and machines when the PPA stopped it. Shipping companies had the duty and power to enforce rules on customers.

Port insiders aver that Malacañang cronies in the shipping industry actually caused the PPA action.

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“A preacher’s role is not to tickle the loss but touch the heart. It is not just to enlighten minds but to set the heart on fire.” Shafts of Light, Fr. Guido Arguelles, SJ

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