NAIA passenger clearance now paperless

MANILA, Philippines – The Bureau of Immigration (BI) at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) arrival terminals started the “paperless” clearance of in-coming and departing passengers midnight of Saturday, March 1.

BI supervisors in the 4 terminals said that the new approach will ease the long lines that arriving and departing passengers used to form while waiting to have their passports stamped.

The new policy is expected to cut by half the almost 16 million forms that passengers used in 2013.

The new setup, BI supervisor Dennis Opiña said, will no longer require arriving Filipinos – among them overseas Filipino workers, seafarers, immigrants, and regular travelers – to fill up immigration arrival cards.

Foreigners who are leaving the country, for their part, are no longer required to fill up departure forms. 

“Arriving Filipinos have already filled up a departure card when they left, while foreigners did the same when they arrived, which are already encoded in computers,” Opiña said.

Most of the important information on these passengers are already indicated in their e-passports anyway, he said. The BI is distributing 372 units of scanners to all major ports and airports to read passengers’ biometrics. 

The forms have also been reformat. They come in blue for arrivals and red for departures. They follow the size of passports.

One less paperwork

Opiña acknowledged that airline passengers are already attending to many concerns at the airport, and easing the requirement for “embarkation and dis-embarkation” cards would be one burden less.

Ed Monreal, Cathay Pacific Airlines station manager, welcomed the new policy. “It is now the practice in Asian neighboring countries, and it saves the government from printing costs.”

During the first night of the paperless clearance, Cathay Pacific’s 233 passengers that arrived at 11:56 pm Friday only presented their passports to the BI booth and “took them only a few seconds…to clear the area.”

The BI cleared within 30 minutes the passengers of two succeeding planes that arrived: Air China with 91 passengers, and Asiana Airlines with 144 passengers

In a presentation at the NAIA last week, Assistant Justice Secretary Geronimo Sy said the BI and the Bureau of Customs are trying to come up with a single form for arriving passengers to eliminate one more paperwork in the process. The BI is under the justice department, while the customs is under the finance department, but they both have inspectors at airports who conduct separate inspections and use separate forms. – Rappler.com