Three weeks ago, my son’s Korean girlfriend left to return home. It proved to be an unnecessarily annoying, tedious and expensive departure. When she attempted to leave on her appointed date, the immigration officer at the airport stopped her for lack of an exit clearance certificate (ECC)—something she, and we, had never heard of before. The officer took her to task, saying “she was supposed to know about these things.” Yet she swears that through two visa extensions, she had never been informed nor seen any notices regarding the ECC at the Bureau of Immigration (BI) offices. Her aborted departure forced her to waste a long-held nonrefundable airline ticket and buy a new one for two days later, at much higher cost. In this information age, it’s a wonder why we can’t have the same databases that are checked by the issuers of the ECC be directly accessible at airport immigration computers. That way, we can spare foreigners the trouble of trooping to the BI offices to obtain a piece of paper. Even granting the need for such document, there are several reasons why my son and his friend were justifiably annoyed with the situation. For one, the requirement does not appear to be adequately publicized. It doesn’t help that the BI website seems constantly unreachable. (I have yet to succeed in accessing it since the incident happened.) My son has since learned from various online blogs of many similar cases of aggrieved foreign travelers being stopped at the airport for lack of an ECC—as if it were the best-kept secret in town! The airport immigration officers told my son and his friend that the ECC could only be obtained at the BI main office in Manila. So they dutifully traveled the following day to the main office in Intramuros (all the way from Los Baños, Laguna where we live), only to be advised to go to the North Edsa branch office, where processing was supposedly faster (and indeed it was, they learned). But why the conflicting information from the BI people themselves? Moreover, they were advised not to buy an airline ticket before obtaining the ECC as under new rules, the ECC must be obtained within three days prior to departure. This forces the passenger to pay much more for his/her departure ticket; we all know that tickets purchased well in advance could be much cheaper. Why make such an unfair imposition on our foreign visitors? And we wonder why we couldn’t attract as many foreign visitors as our neighbors do? Many of us are led to lament how too many people working in government still seem to find great difficulty with genuine public service, honesty, consistency and even common sense. Instead we find too much of unnecessary hurdles, brazen corruption, arbitrariness and ineptness. While I do believe that “daang matuwid” is making real progress, I can’t help feeling that the road ahead remains quite long indeed. (E-mail: cielito.habito@gmail) Follow us: @inquirerdotnet on Twitter | inquirerdotnet on Facebook
Posted on: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 06:00:56 +0000
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