By Filane Mikee Cervantes/ PNA
MANILA — Senator Joel Villanueva on Thursday said there is a special provision in the proposed 2019 national budget prohibiting the Bureau of Immigration to issue special work permits to aliens amid the influx of illegal foreign workers in the country.
In an ambush interview following the Senate hearing on the rise of foreign illegal workers in the Philippines, Villanueva said the BI lacks the capacity to vet the issuance of special working permits to these foreigners, particularly in determining whether these jobs cannot be done by Filipinos.
Article 40 of the Labor Code states that the Department of Labor and Employment can issue an employment permit to non-resident aliens after a determination of the non-availability of Filipinos who are competent, able, and willing at the time of application to perform the jobs.
“That’s why in the GAA [General Appropriations Act] that the president will sign, we put in place a provision in the budget that would ban the BI from issuing Special Working Permits because they don’t have the capacity as an agency to vet, whether or not they should give the jobs to foreigners because Filipinos can’t do the job,” Villanueva said in Filipino.
During the hearing, BI Commissioner Jaime Morente said the bureau issues special working permits to foreigners seeking employment for less than six months even if they did not have alien employment permits from DOLE.
Morente, however, said the BI added safeguards to ensure that it would not issue special working permits to foreigners for jobs that Filipinos are capable of performing or are able and willing to perform these.
He said supplemental guidelines for special work permits and and provisional work permits were released, which identified a negative list of jobs that automatically disqualifies applications for such permits.
Villanueva stressed the need to have an inter-agency method of checks and balances to avoid the current problem on the influx of illegal foreign workers, noting that there is a special provision in the budget mandating the BI to coordinate with the DOLE pertaining to the entry of foreign workers.
Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said the inter-agency committee could start focusing on the completion of the inventory of all foreign workers in the country.
Bello cited that DOLE regional offices issued 169,893 alien employment permits from 2015 to 2018 or an average of 42,000 per year.
