I AM writing this while waiting inside the Department of Foreign Affairs office in Cagayan de Oro City together with countless others eager to apply for their passport for the first time or renewing them. There are about five hundred of us at this hour and within the day, a couple of thousands would have been served by my estimate.
The air is pregnant with anticipation here. Every one of us holds a thick wad of documents and we clutch on these as if our whole lives depended on them papers that prove our identity and our eligibility to travel abroad. I am sure that there are some here who are seasoned travelers. The new passport is for the scheduled vacation to the newest tourist destination made possible by affordable promo fares of budget airlines. But for the majority of us here, there are far greater motivations and higher stakes involved.
You can see it in the shifty eyes and tensed shoulders of majority of those waiting. You can feel it hanging heavily in the air of the small under-ventilated room. You can almost read their thoughts hovering above their heads. A father seeks reprieve from the bad luck he and his family has been afflicted with for decades here in the homeland. He feels that trying his luck somewhere else might change his fate. A daughter prays fervently that the saints will guide her in this new stage in her life. She had relied on her pious petitions since college to pull her through difficulties and she is expecting their intercession as she casts her future to that overseas employment.
For many of us here, securing our passport is the first official confirmation of our Filipino identity as certified by the state. There are prerequisites before one reaches this stage and they must be complied with. The authenticated birth certificate, NBI clearance, and other requirements are hurdles that must be overcome. Each piece of official document that we now hold in our hands has their own story to tell.
That wrong detail in the birth certificate, the “hit” in the NBI clearance, the long queues and uncertainty over the processes are just some of the examples of the adventures that one had to overcome to reach this stage. Like an obstacle course, the maze of hurdles and roadblocks before one secures a passport are formidable. This is the cause why Filipinos probably have the worst passport photos around. By the time, they have their photos and biometrics taken; they would have undergone a maze of bureaucratic hurdles to achieve that signature Filipino haggard look.
It is also ironic that acquiring the Filipino passport is actually the first step to losing it. Many of us here can’t wait to leave our shores and accept the possibility of not coming back actually, if one gets lucky enough to get a green card or immigrant status from the country of one’s dreams.
I doubt if the same kind of process is also experienced by people of other nationalities. Whereas other citizens of other nationalities simply mail their applications and their photos to the issuing government office and they receive it back by post, ours is a complicated process made more intricate by high incidents of human trafficking and illegal migration involving Filipinos abroad.
It is a strange process actually which jolts us out of the taken-for-granted nature of our citizenship as Filipinos. We are perhaps the only country that requires its citizens to prove their citizenship to government through these requirements.
Such measures were put in place by our own government to submit to the standards of receiving countries. But for anyone who has crossed borders, we know how these are not enough to dispel suspicions about our motives when we enter their countries and show to them our Philippine passports. There is always that second glance, that additional confirmatory question about the purpose and duration of visit, that our passport attracts before immigration officers the world over.
The frenzy of activity and the lines outside our passport issuing offices are indicative of how our nation’s economy has been oriented towards the export of labor in the past few decades. These make the busy passport issuing offices and the high volume of people that congregate here unique compared to other countries. And the relative low prestige of a Philippine passport compared to that of other nations is an indication of what role we have come to play in the global economic order – a docile army of cheap labor angling for low-paying jobs that no one in the host country is willing to take on.
When Duterte bravely proclaimed before OFWs in Japan in his recent state visit that they will be the last generation of Filipinos forced to work abroad, it signaled his government’s policy to end the export of our skilled mothers and fathers, and our family members by providing them with decent jobs at home. If this finally comes true, then the Philippine passport shall finally be a badge of national pride and honor.
