HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — Guam Visitors Bureau President and CEO Carl Gutierrez is seeking to leverage national overriding defense objectives in Guam and the Republic of the Philippines in pursuit of visa waivers for Filipinos seeking to visit Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
“U.S. armed forces strategy across (Pacific Command’s) dual-hemisphere area of responsibility requires Guam, the Philippines and other Pacific access ways as deterrents against China’s communist influence, encroachment and aggression,” Gutierrez stated in a GVB press release.
The policy change would be in line with America’s military, foreign and economic policies, he said.
“By hubbing and basing its way across the Pacific, America is defending a way of life that upholds economic freedom and cooperation. And, it is by this token that we implore the powers that be in our nation’s capital to grant Guam and the Philippines’ mutual desire to drop the visa requirement on Filipinos who wish to visit Guam and even the CNMI,” Gutierrez added.
Visa waiver
The Guam-CNMI Visa Waiver Program, under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, currently allows passport holders from a dozen nations visa-free access to Guam and the CNMI. Although most of those countries are in the Pacific, the Philippines has yet to become eligible, the GVB release stated.
“Gutierrez asserts that U.S. immigration security concerns have long been outmoded by traveling Filipinos’ status as educated upper-middle-income earners with rapidly falling overstay rates and high-tech e-Passports outfitted with (radio frequency identification) tags. In other words, social and economic freedom has given rise to higher standards of living, befitting travel without visas, if not to the U.S. mainland, then at least to nearby Guam and the Northern Marianas, which all fall within the same archipelago,” GVB said in the release.
This information comes as the Philippine Congress considers House Resolution 332, which would urge President Joe Biden to include the Philippines in the Guam-CNMI Visa Waiver Program. U.S. passport holders are able to enter the Philippines without a visa.
Allies and partners
The resolution states that the Philippines and the U.S. remain “friendly defense allies and trade partners” for mutual freedom and security.
It adds that upward of 70,000 Filipinos living in Guam “beckon their families to visit them” and hundreds of H-2B workers on island also wish to be visited by family, while touting that GVB statistics indicate that spending from visiting Filipinos often exceeds those visiting from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
According to GVB, the resolution was introduced Sept. 1, 2022, within three months of a Guam delegation’s visit to Manila that included ten Guam mayors.
The resolution’s author, Cagayan de Oro Second District House Rep. Rufus Rodriguez, was the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by Gutierrez and the Mayors’ Council of Guam in Manila last summer, according to GVB, which added that another gathering included 17 mayors from the Philippines and Negros Occidental Gov. Eugenio Jose Villareal Lacson.
According to GVB, Gutierrez’s strategy is to build a “grassroot network” of mayors and other public officials in Guam and the Philippines “to create a groundswell of popular support that can’t help but be noticed and appreciated by decision makers from Guam to Manila to Washington.”
Gutierrez’s initiative and the Philippine House resolution run parallel with a local resolution introduced by Sen. William Parkinson, which urges Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero to petition U.S. Homeland Security to expand the Guam-CNMI Visa Waiver Program to include the Philippines.
Parkinson introduced the resolution after a meeting with GVB, in which Gutierrez stressed the need for a Filipino tourist visa waiver to further economic recovery efforts.
Carl Gutierrez, president of the Guam Visitors Bureau, sits with Philippine Rep. Rufus B. Rodriguez in this September 2019 file photo, for an endorsement of visa waivers for Filipino travelers wanting to visit Guam and the CNMI.
