By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
Kudos to Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo-Puyat for her jet-speed action on calls to reassess the minimum age to qualify foreigners for the Philippine Retirement Authority (PRA) program to stay in the country.
At last week’s budget hearing for the Department of Tourism and its attached agencies, several senators were alarmed when the PRA, upon questioning, revealed that 27,678 Chinese nationals are currently holders of the Special Retirees Residence Visa (SRRV).
The SRRV is issued to enrollees to the PRA, which was created in 1985 to market the Philippines as a retirement haven and attract leisure and investment-oriented foreigners who can help spur social and economic development.
In 1993, the age requirement for enrollment in the PRA was lowered from 50 to 35 to capture the young millionaires’ club, which rose in the 1990s and the turn of the century from the infotech-digital revolution.
However, it appears that in recent years, what we lured into this tourism trap are the Chinese, choosing to retire in the Philippines instead of in their superpower motherland. Their numbers suddenly bloated to 40 percent of the total 70,520 foreigners enrolled in the PRA program.
What’s disturbing is that 8,130 of the 10,813 Chinese principal enrollees (not including their wives and kids – who are also SRRV holders) in the PRA are in the age bracket of 35 to 49.
Senators Nancy Binay and Richard Gordon flagged this as the “soldier’s age” bracket and a possible threat to our national security. Any foreigner with $50,000 to invest in a business or use to buy a condo may, in fact, be led to the shortcut into residing in our country. But we don’t want “sleepers”.
PRA General Manager Bienvenido Chy said the PRA guidelines were not made to suit the Chinese and are, in fact, applicable to all foreign nationals. But the fact is, so many Chinese from the mainland have availed themselves of it and they’re too young to retire. What on earth are they doing here?
Sen. Joel Villanueva has a theory to answer this question. He says there’s a possibility that these PRA enrollees from China actually entered the country to work in the booming Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGO) industry. If so, that means they’re here in the country taking away jobs from Filipinos.
Puyat, although an alter-ego of our President who loves China so much, was quick to call for a meeting of the PRA Board of Directors – which she heads – to review its guidelines for issuing SRRVs to ensure we’re not attracting workers or sleepers.
And before the week ended, she announced the suspension of processing all applications for PRA enrollment, pending “an enhanced program to regularly monitor the profile and activities of active SRRV holders in coordination with other government agencies, such as the Bureau of Immigration (BI), Department of Justice, and the Department of Labor and Employment”.
Now, that’s a lady with fishballs!
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