Unruly passenger

I spent quite a few laborious minutes poring over my arrival card. You know, that paper flight attendants hand out inside planes bound for Pinas. It is distributed to all the passengers, and there’s a clear expectation that everyone should fill it up, to be handed over to Immigration authorities upon landing.

The card asks for much information from the passenger, stuff that, we should note, is already asked by the e-arrival website that was established for COVID-purposes. Basically, we are asked to duplicate the effort required just to satisfy a different government agency.

Would it not be an excellent notion if that website just sends us a QR code (which it does) that, when scanned by the Bureau of Immigration (which it doesn’t), will just tell them everything they needs to know (and more!) about the arriving passenger? Of course, I am dreaming.

I peruse the card. It asks for my address abroad. I wonder why I have to let Immigration know where I stayed the past few days. They don’t have the capability to check whether I really stayed in the posh hotel I’m writing down. I might just be pretending to be posh.

If Immigration checked the hotel, the hotel might rebuff them for breaching my privacy. I assume Immigration cares about whether I’m telling the truth --as is observed in most personnel in the government service, they probably don’t give a wahoo.

The immigration form also asks for either an email address or a phone number. It is painfully obvious that it is discretionary for the passenger to supply whichever they feel like supplying. Which leads one to think: How are they keeping track of whether the phone numbers or email addresses are accurate?

Should the government be dialing each number as it is supplied, just to make sure the passenger can be contacted while within Philippine shores? Facetious question. Of course our government is doing no such thing. So you can probably supply whatever digits (or email address) you feel like, and the information will never be vetted.

One is made to answer the box labeled “profession”. Much as I would like to answer “the oldest one” I have developed the habit recently of not wanting to call any attention to my age. So I place there “lawyer”, just to scare them off. They wouldn’t know my practice is limited to safe sex. But I would much rather answer “columnist” or “writer”, except we get no respect nowadays.

Which leads me to the point:  I don’t see the need for Immigration to ask their citizens what occupations they have. One could be jobless, or otherwise unoccupied, and yet she would still be entitled to return to her home country. Who cares what the returning Filipino citizen’s profession is? Even if the Bureau is full of gossips, the officers shouldn’t care. That entire box should be deleted.

Full of indignant thoughts, we deplane, and we walk into the immigration hall. At a new-fangled machine, Filipinos are made to scan their passports, and have their photos taken. A sticker is printed out, and the arriving passenger strides out to the carousel to claim the baggage. As for the much-maligned (by this column) arrival card, it stays forlorn inside the passport.

That begs the question: Why does this card even exist? Why do we make thousands of passengers fill this up every day, when it isn’t even collected? Why does the printer keep on supplying the government with this useless piece of paper? Why is taxpayer money being used to purchase this non-essential? Why are we littering the planet with arrival cards that have no business existing?

Don’t let me get started on the Customs declaration form (it’s safely tucked away, together with the arrival card).