Officials Note The Form Also Asks If Visitor Plans To Return Which Creates Certain Philosophical Paradoxes
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Philippine Bureau Of Immigration Introduces New Arrival Form With Forty Seven Questions About Whether The Visitor Has Been To The Philippines Before
NINOY AQUINO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT — The Philippine Bureau of Immigration introduced a new arrival card Tuesday that foreign visitors must complete before entering the country, which includes, across its three pages and forty-seven questions, fourteen separate inquiries about whether the visitor has previously visited the Philippines, each phrased slightly differently and each requiring an independent affirmative or negative response.
The new form, called the Enhanced Visitor Information and Entry Declaration form, was developed over eighteen months by a Bureau committee charged with “improving the comprehensiveness of arrival data collection.” The form’s fourteen prior-visit questions include: “Have you visited the Philippines before?”; “Is this your first visit to the Philippines?”; “Have you entered the Philippines on a prior occasion?”; “Is the current visit a return visit?”; “Have you previously departed from the Philippines after an entry?”; and, most ambitiously, “Would you characterize your relationship with the Philippines as ongoing rather than inaugural?”
Bureau of Immigration Commissioner Alfredo Guerrero-Bautista, presenting the new form at a press conference, described it as “a significant improvement in our data infrastructure.” He explained that the multiple prior-visit questions were designed to “cross-validate visitor responses through repeated inquiry” and to “ensure that visitors who may have forgotten previous visits are given multiple opportunities to remember them.”
The Forty-Seven Questions
The remaining thirty-three questions cover: the visitor’s name (three questions, covering full legal name, name as it appears on passport, and preferred name); the visitor’s nationality (two questions); the visitor’s country of residence (one question); the visitor’s country of birth (one question); the visitor’s purpose of visit (seven questions covering various subsets of tourism, business, medical, educational, and what question 22 describes as “other purposes not covered by questions 15 through 21”); the visitor’s intended length of stay (three questions, covering days, weeks, and whether the stay will extend beyond thirty days); accommodation information (four questions); onward travel details (five questions); and emergency contact information (two questions).
The emergency contact questions are followed immediately by a question asking whether the visitor has emergency contact information available, which is question 44, and which appears after questions 42 and 43 have already collected the emergency contact information.
This kind of question architecture, in which information is collected and then its collection is verified in a subsequent question, is consistent with a long tradition of bureaucratic form design in which the form’s internal logic reflects the concerns of multiple design committees whose work was not fully integrated before printing.
The Philosophical Paradox
Question 38 asks: “Do you intend to return to the Philippines after your current visit?” The question is designed, the Bureau explained, to gather data about return visit intentions for tourism planning purposes.
Several immigration lawyers and logicians, contacted for comment, noted that a visitor who answers “yes” to question 38 immediately creates a problem for questions 1 through 14 on their next arrival, because at their next arrival they will be answering “yes” to the prior-visit questions rather than “no,” which will require different answers to fourteen questions and therefore a functionally different form, despite the visitor being the same person.
Additionally, a visitor who answers “yes” to question 38 and then, for various reasons, does not return has produced an inconsistency in the Bureau’s database between their stated intention and their actual behavior that the database has no mechanism for reconciling. The Bureau’s response to this concern, when raised at the press conference, was that “the data collection and data reconciliation systems are separate functions that will be addressed in different phases of the implementation.”
This is consistent with a wider pattern in government data systems where collection and reconciliation are treated as logically separate rather than as components of an integrated system.
Completion Time
The Bureau estimates that the new form takes approximately twelve minutes for an average visitor to complete. The previous form, which contained nine questions, took approximately two minutes. At NAIA’s current annual arrival volume of approximately 47 million passengers, the additional ten minutes per passenger produces approximately 7.8 million additional processing hours annually across all arrival points.
The Bureau has not provided staffing estimates for processing the additional completion time. The Bureau has noted that completion happens before the immigration counter, so the additional time “does not affect counter processing efficiency.” It does affect the queue before the counter, where it has, in the form’s first two days of operation, added approximately forty minutes to arrival processing times at peak hours.
Traveler Reactions
Travelers at NAIA on Tuesday and Wednesday, completing the new form in the arrival hall, expressed reactions ranging from mild irritation to philosophical equanimity. One Australian business traveler, completing his twenty-third visit to the Philippines, told reporters he had answered “yes” to each of the fourteen prior-visit questions and had then questioned whether his answers were “slightly redundant.”
A first-time visitor from Germany said the form had been “thorough” and that she was “now very certain I have not been here before.”
For more on Philippine bureaucratic innovation, see NewsThump for related British government form design coverage.
The Bureau has indicated it will “evaluate the form’s effectiveness after six months” and may “make adjustments based on operational experience.” The form will remain in use during the evaluation period.