Boost to Filipino pride

Many years ago, I was traveling from Manila to Belgium and happened to sit beside a Filipino woman working overseas. She confided that she had married a Belgian man and was returning “home” to him after a brief visit to the Philippines to see her family.

As we walked from the arrival area to the immigration section, we were stopped by a man in uniform who identified himself as an immigration officer. My new acquaintance was already carrying her passport in her hand and apparently this was what attracted the man’s attention. He stopped her and asked to study her passport. The young woman appeared flustered and nervous, and so I intervened and offered to show my Philippine passport, too. Looking annoyed, the man simply waved both of us through to line up at the counter.

When I told friends about this encounter, I was rather taken aback by their reactions. Essentially these boiled down to the woman’s “foolishness” in putting her Philippine passport on display. “Don’t you know that immigration officials abroad keep an eye out for Philippine passports because so many of them are fake?” a friend told me.

This annoyed and saddened me. Had it come to this that our passports, which other nationals brandish with pride and self-assurance, have become symbols of our national embarrassment and a less-than-sterling reputation?

This may be born of foreigners’ disdain for citizens of the Third World, to which we undoubtedly belong, but there are also reasons for their distrust of our national travel document. A friend tells of the time she was detained at a foreign airport because when the immigration officer opened her passport, the stitching gave way and the pages were scattered. Her story has been repeated many other times by other travelers, especially overseas workers who confess to feeling deep embarrassment—not to mention going through the extra hassle of being interrogated—when their shoddy passports are inspected.

A passport is the “highest level of identity” for a citizen of any country. As such, it is not just a travel document but also a symbol of one’s country as well. A shabby, messy passport represents a shabby, messy country.

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On Monday, P-Noy will lead in a live demonstration of the new Philippine e-passport system, from application or enrollment, including the capture of biometrics and biographical data, to printing and then verification, which will be performed in a matter of minutes.

The e-passport demonstration will take place at the newly-inaugurated high-security printing plant of the APO Production Unit in Malvar, Batangas. APO is one of only three official government printers (the other two being the National Printing Office and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas) which specializes in security printing, including official forms and Bureau of Internal Revenue stamps, which are being produced in the same printing plant.

At present, according to data from the Department of Foreign Affairs, there is a demand for 15,000 Philippine passports a day, not just from local passport-issuing offices (some of them located in shopping malls) but even from offices abroad, which service the needs of overseas Filipinos. But present capabilities can produce just 3,000 passports daily, leading to backlogs and delays, much to the chagrin of travelers, especially OFWs who need to travel to their places of work on a fixed schedule.

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The new system is expected to facilitate passport production not just here but also abroad. But even more important, the system is expected to “certify” the security and integrity of the Philippine passport (compliant with global standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization), which should improve the image not only of our passports but also of our country and country folk, who can now display their passports with pride and not with embarrassment.

To demonstrate the speed and convenience of the new e-passport system, simultaneous to P-Noy’s demonstration will be similar demonstrations undertaken by Ambassador Antonio Morales at the Embassy in Singapore, and Ambassador Wilfredo Santos at the Embassy in Doha, Qatar. OFWs are expected to take part in the demonstrations as well.

The new process of producing the e-passports (expected to be made available to the public in a few months’ time) promises a shorter production time and shorter waiting period of application, while reducing human intervention to a minimum in the process, resulting in a document with a new design and security features that prevent fraud.

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We had a chance, during a visit to the APO plant, to study a prototype of the new e-passport. International trends point to the creation of a passport that is not only a travel document but also a proud display of the country’s history, heritage, arts and culture.

At the same time, designs in the passport pages incorporate security features that make it difficult for fakers to produce bogus passports or else replace visa pages or data pages from legitimate passports while escaping detection.

The prototype I saw, printed on security paper, bears a running theme based on the national anthem, while bearing sights and signposts of the various regions of the country.

An electronic chip embedded in each passport also serves as a backup security feature, by which immigration officers can verify data contained in the data page and in the electronic data strip.

The best news of all is that, despite the “new look” and the enhanced security features, the new e-passport will still be priced at P950 per passport when it is finally made available to the public. A boon to the traveling public, undoubtedly, but also a boost to Filipino pride.