‘PHL passports liable to fall apart’

Wednesday, 13 June 2012 19:23 Recto Mercene / Reporter

AIRPORT immigration officials warned Filipino travelers on Monday that the new machine readable passports that the Department of Foreign Affairs started to issue in 2009 are of poor quality and should not to be inserted in plastic jackets because they are liable to fall apart while being pulled out.

“The new brown-colored passports are of poor quality, many have disintegrated when pulled out of their passport jacket,” Marie Vitan, immigration deputy chief of operations at Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) arrival area, said.

Vitan said daily, many returning Filipino workers that find their passports are easily damaged because the stitching gives way and the pages loosen to the extent that the cover and the pages completely separate.

This experience was recounted by a Filipino-Chinese businessman to local media men after he returned from Hong Kong recently.

Edward (not his real name) have bundled together all his previous passports, including the new one, with a rubber band.

When the Hong Kong immigration official pulled out his new passport, the pages became loose in the hands of the immigration officer, with some spilling on the floor.

“Why, your passport is of poor quality,” the immigration officer told Edward, while trying to locate his passport among the piles of pages that scattered on his desk.

Airport supervisor Augustus Caesar Morales warned travelers not to insert the passport in clear plastic, the usual potective cover sold by vendors near the DFA Consular Office.

“Over time, the passport cover sticks to the plastic jacket, and when an immigration agent tries to remove it so that the document could be inserted in the machine to have the data read, the passport cover plastic stick together, while the binding of pages become loose.

Morales said he was told that many of the Filipinos who travel abroad encounter the same problem at the port of entry.

He was told that may Filipino travelers have been embarrassed before foreign immigration officers when their passports disintegrated.

“More often, they are taken aside and told to wait until the immigration agent has processed the documents of the new arrivals,” Morales said, thus sometimes delaying the movement of the Filipino traveler, who sometimes had to take connecting flights. The other reason is that the foreign immigration officers suspect that the passport could have been a bogus one, so that it takes them some time to subject the document to examination.

He said he doesn’t know if the DFA is aware of the situation. Morales said as far as he knew, the passports are printed by the Bangko Sentral printing press since its pages are made of security paper.

The passports, that are valid for five years, have microchips containing all the data related to the owner, embedded. A machine reads the coded encryption, providing faster processing of passengers and some say, fool-proof way of determining passengers who are on the black list or on the International Police Organization (Interpol) list of wanted persons.

Many migrant workers have complained that when they brought their damaged passport to the DFA to be replaced, they were told to wait for 15 days.

Many times, the workers miss their scheduled return flights to their places of work while waiting for their new passports.

The airport immigration officials said the DFA should consider issuing a more durable travel document since its poor quality reflects on the country’s poor way of treating its citizens, the new “heroes” of the country who remitted $19 billion last year.