The Bureau of Immigration said it will hire another 195 immigration officers by yearend to deploy them by the first quarter of 2022.
BI Commissioner Jaime Morente said the bureau’s personnel selection board is currently fast-tracking the process of selecting new immigration inspectors so they could be deployed to the country’s major airports in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, as well as border crossing stations in the south by January next year.
Earlier this month, the bureau conducted online interviews to aspiring immigration officers. Hundreds of applicants were interviewed by the BI heads after hurdling their online examination.
“The list of qualified applicants will be submitted to the Department of Justice (DOJ), who will then select those who will be hired,” said Morente.
“Upon hiring, these new immigration officers could be trained right away and deployed to serve the traveling public,” he said.
Morente stressed that the new batch of recruits will have to undergo a three-month training on immigration laws, rules, and procedures prior to getting their field assignments as border control officers.
According to BI acting personnel chief Grifton Medina, the bureau is expected to recruit another batch of over a hundred new immigration officers early next year to augment the number of personnel manning the ports.
Medina said the bureau is also expediting to promote some 131 personnel occupying the position of Immigration Officer I, who have applied for promotion to the rank of Immigration Officer II.
“Their promotions will naturally lead to additional job vacancies in our plantilla, which we will have to fill to address our perennial problem of manpower shortage at the airports,” he added.
The Standard learned that there are around 450 BI officers assigned to the NAIA, with 98 newly-hired officers undergoing on-the-job training on the conduct of immigration formalities for arriving and departing passengers.
The number of flights and passengers at the NAIA have remained very low compared to previous years due to continuing restrictions on the entry of foreign tourists, imposed when the coronavirus pandemic began in March last year.