Bureau of Immigration (BI) Commissioner Marcelino C. Libanan said yesterday that a total of 308 foreigners were excluded from January to June as the bureau continued to tighten its screening and monitoring of foreigners arriving at the country’s premier port of entry.

He said the BI could not simply lower its guard with the volume of foreigner arrivals at the NAIA reaching more than three million during the six-month period, up by seven percent over the 2.8 million who came in the same period last year.

Libanan said most of the foreign visitors who were turned back were caught using spurious travel documents, adding that most of passengers were victims of syndicates using Manila as transit point for their human trafficking operations.

"I have already directed that they be placed in our blacklist so that they will not be able to return to our country in the future," Libanan said, as he commended immigration officers at the NAIA for a job well done.

The BI chief stressed that it is now difficult for illegal foreigners to slip through the NAIA unmolested as a result of the continuous training of immigration officers who are now more adept in detecting fraudulent travel documents.

He said the task of screening and profiling foreigners at the NAIA is not only performed by BI personnel at the counters but also by members of the migration compliance and monitoring group (MCMG), a team which double checks the documents of passengers with suspicious profiles.

Libanan also said that a BI anti-fraud unit is in place at the NAIA whose members are capable and trained in the art of detecting bogus and tampered passports and visas.