Can I go back to Philippines without OEC?

Hello. I have a friend who wants to go home urgent for good. He is asking if he just buy a plane ticket and bring hisnpassport, can he be able to pass the immigration? Would the immigration wont ask anything if he is going back to the philippines without oec? Please advise. Thank you

Are you holding Philippine passport? if yes they will not ask anything unless if you have criminal record.

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You don’t need it to exit Taiwan.

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Taiwanese immigration won’t ask for his OEC, so he should be fine. Also, if he’s going back for good, I don’t see why he’d need an OEC.

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Philippines is one of the few countries on the planet that doesn’t allow its citizens unfettered exit from the country. Everywhere else - including Taiwan - all you need is your passport. For foreigners, there’s the additional requirement that you haven’t overstayed your visa terms. Even if he has, I wouldn’t worry too much - there may well be a fine and he’ll probably be banned from re-entry for a while, but he won’t be denied exit. He’s not going to be hauled off to the equivalent of BI-Bicutan.

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So I was wondering what a OEC was… is that Philippine’s exit visa?

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It’s one of several pointless pieces of paper Filipinos have to get before they’re allowed to board a plane out of (their own) country. The government has to make it as hard as possible for people to leave, otherwise the country would just be empty and they’d have nobody to steal from.

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Well that’s one thing people aren’t advertised on… most assume that filippinos can just leave their country whenever they want. Even China doesn’t require pointless papers to leave their country, in fact there are a ton of chinese students abroad. Is it because Philippine has a brain drain or something? It really sounds like north korea to require papers to leave.

I heard Russia also require exit visas to leave the country.

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It’s probably part of it. Most of this sort of thing has no point at all, though, other than to provide jobs for bureaucrats rubber-stamping things.

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Well Wikipedia doesnt say anything about PH requiring an exit visa.

But it seems foreigners have to get exit visas to leave too

Of course PH says OEC requirement is to “protect overseas workers”

i think its more of a form of taxation, the OEC costs money which the government keeps. And if you want to get yours more smoothly, it requires a “tip”, that the local official keeps.

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It’s absolutely this, just under the guise of “hey man, we’re trying to stop you from being trafficked, okay???”. In my case, since I’m a PH national with a foreign spouse, I have to present a dinky little certificate at PH border control when I leave the country.

For the curious, the certificate just proves that you’ve done the seminar given to Filipinos with foreign partners/spouses (they’ll tell you it’s just a 20 minute thing, but it took well over two hours when I sat thru it). Tedious and honestly pretty pointless, but it’s the PH - gotta pad some pockets somehow.

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Well Taiwan gets put in Wikipedia for requiring men who hasn’t served in the army to register something before they can leave the country, but PH gets almost no mention.

Amazingly pointless

Tbh you won’t find much info about this online. Hell, a lot of PH gov’t offices can’t be arsed to update their websites, so you often find yourself rushing to get all these other documents sorted just to get one very simple thing done :melting_face:

And when you finally make it to the airport with your bundle of documents, if the immigration official doesn’t like the look of your paperwork, you don’t get on that plane.

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Most countries that have Compulsory National Service have restrictions like that. Stops people flying the coop to avoid Military Service.

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So when Germany had their mandatory national service how did they keep them from running off to Latvia or whatever? I mean because it’s all part of Schengen Zone meaning no border control between them…

It was like this in Italy until there was the mandatory conscription. All the IDs and passports of able bodied men had a special note and required special permission to go abroad. Since the suspension of conscription, all restrictions were lifted.

Article 13 of the UDHR states that everyone shall have the right to leave their own country (it now says “any country”, but I’m pretty sure this has been altered). Of course such things are subject to yes-buttery by individual states, and in practice aren’t worth squat.