EDITORIAL — That troublesome backdoor

This week saw the repatriation of many Filipinos who had been taken advantage of abroad.

There were the three Filipinos who had been lured to work for a scam hub in Cambodia. They said they would be tortured or beaten if they committed “offenses”. Even after they escaped they said their employers put out bounties to find them.

Then there were also 30 Filipinos just returned from Myanmar where they were also tricked into working for a scam hub. One victim said they were also beaten, maltreated, or left exposed to the heat of the sun if they couldn’t meet their daily “quota”. He said they were only rescued after the Myanmar military conducted a surprise inspection of the facility.

Sadly, stories like these are becoming more common.

One thing authorities found similar among many victims is that they have no documents or records showing that they left the country. Which leads them to conclude one thing --something that many of the victims also admit-- they left the Philippines through the “backdoor”.

The backdoor is the term for the area where, and the method with which, people can leave the Philippines without any immigration records whatsoever. While this has come to physically mean southern Philippines close to other ASEAN countries, it can now be anywhere someone is smuggled in or out illegally.

The backdoor has become the favored way for illegal recruiters to smuggle people out of the Philippines. If authorities don’t know certain people are out of the country then they won’t guess they are being victimized somewhere abroad.

We don’t have to tell you the backdoor can also be used to smuggle people into the country unrecorded. Perhaps victims themselves forced to work in similar scam hubs that persist to this day here.

It’s time we do something about this backdoor.

We realize that this will be a challenge, considering we will have to police an area of open sea and a lot of porous borders. And that takes up a lot of resources that we don’t have.

But if nothing is done to secure the backdoor then we can be sure more Filipinos will be surreptitiously taken out of the country to who-knows-where to work as slaves in some criminal enterprise. We can also be sure people will continue to be smuggled in.