Idiots, still

THOSE IMMIGRATION agents in Clark are at it again.

My compadre, dwRW manager and broadcaster par excellence Perry Pangan, greeted me as I was getting out of my truck at the parking lot of SM City Clark, late Sunday afternoon.

What? I asked him as I greeted cumareng Myrna and their son.

My daughter’s flight to Singapore got delayed for over an hour because of the undermanned immigration counters. The same things you’ve written about a number of times.

Yeah, I remembered, it was what I called the general policy of idiocy ruling the Bureau of Immigration at the Clark International Airport which made its aka – for also known as – the DMIA, mean  Damned Moronic Immigration Agents.

As one editorial here exposed: At the CIA departure area, there are six immigration counters but only two are regularly manned, no matter the volume of passengers.
Which on most occasion result to delayed flights out of CIA. And thus delayed arrival at the destination points, ever prompting the captain to go over the airliner’s public address system: “Stringent checking at immigration has caused our delay.” 
We beg your pardon, Sir. It is not stringent checking but plain idiocy that delayed the flight. Immigration – with all the stringent checking – could have easily moved the passengers with but the rest of their counters manned.
A month or so after our critical articles, we received a letter from Immigration Commissioner Ricardo David, Jr. narrating the action his office has taken to improve the situation at the immigration desks of the CIA.

Within that period we were told by CIA staff that there was a mass replacement of immigration agents at Clark.

To be fair, in my travels to Kuala Lumpur in June and to Hong Kong-Macau this June and July, I noticed a marked improvement in the facility of immigration procedures both at the departure and arrival areas.

Just last week, immigration at CIA was a breeze to and from Bangkok.

Maybe, I told Perry, it was a case of natiyempo with his daughter, with tight flight schedules, high volume of passengers.

Anyways, I said I was keeping my fingers crossed as I also came from the CIA, dropping off my son Jonathan there for his 19:15 flight back to Hong Kong.

Malas! At 18:10, I got a text from Jonathan messaging he was being held at immigration.

I tried to call some friends with immigration connections to help out. But nothing came out of it. Jonathan was offloaded       

So what happened I asked my son soon as he got in my truck for the trip back home.

The immigration agents asked him the purpose of his travel.

Jonathan said he worked in Hong Kong and just had a vacation here.

Proof of employment?

Jonathan presented 1) his contract with Manulife Financial (Hongkong) as actuarial specialist “on loan” from Manulife Philippines, his principal employer, and 2) his Hong Kong resident ID card.

In a previous vacation, only last April, those documents were enough for immigration to stamp his passport, allowing him to fly.

But not this time. The immigration agent asked him to produce his Manulife Philippines ID which Jonathan had to retrieve from his checked-in luggage.

So, that ID was presented. Only for Jonathan to be told that he needed some “OEC” from the POEA. This, as some positive confirmation of his work contract kuno.

End result: No flight.     

So, since when was this OEC from POEA made a requisite for travel abroad?

So why didn’t the immigration agents just tell my son of that requirement at the onset?

If this is not harassment, it could only be idiocy.

And this is the government service I get for the hundreds of thousands of pesos  deducted as taxes from my paycheck yearly, lamented my son.

Morons. Idiocy inheres in the Bureau of Immigration. No amount of replacements of immigration agents at the CIA could ever cure this.