Trust Issues

By Eliza Bellones

Before a recent trip abroad, I found myself doing what many Filipinos do before passing through immigration: worrying. Not because I lacked documents. Not because I had done anything wrong. Yet somewhere between checking my passport and waiting for my flight, I felt a familiar anxiety that many Filipino travelers would likely recognize. What if they ask a question I answer poorly? What if they think something looks suspicious? What if there is some requirement I overlooked?

The feeling itself seemed strange. Immigration officers are not prosecutors. They are not there to catch ordinary tourists making honest mistakes. Their role, at least in principle, is to enforce travel regulations and protect people from risks such as trafficking, illegal recruitment, and document fraud. Yet for many Filipinos, immigration often feels less like a safeguard and more like an obstacle. As I sat with that thought, I realized the issue was not really immigration. It was trust.

Many of us have learned to approach public institutions with suspicion. We assume inconvenience before protection, hostility before service, failure before competence. Even when an institution is performing a legitimate function, our first instinct is often to wonder how it might go wrong. The reaction is understandable. Trust does not disappear without reason.

For decades, Filipinos have watched public confidence in institutions erode through corruption scandals, bureaucratic inefficiency, political patronage, and promises that rarely seem to materialize into meaningful change. We have grown accustomed to systems that feel slow, opaque, and unreliable. We have learned, through experience, that skepticism is often rewarded more than faith.

Over time, that skepticism becomes more than a political opinion. It becomes a habit of mind. We encounter government offices expecting frustration. We hear about new regulations and immediately wonder how they will be abused. We assume that procedures exist to burden us rather than protect us. Even when safeguards serve legitimate purposes, we struggle to view them outside the framework of distrust.

The result is a difficult paradox. We want institutions capable of protecting vulnerable people, preventing abuse, and enforcing accountability. We want governments that function effectively and responsibly. Yet we increasingly approach those same institutions with the assumption that they are incapable of acting in the public interest.

Perhaps the deeper problem is not merely that institutions have failed to earn trust. It is that many citizens have stopped imagining that trust can be earned at all. This is not an argument for blind faith in government. Public institutions should be scrutinized. They should be questioned, challenged, and held accountable. Trust without accountability is not civic virtue; it is complacency.

But there is also a cost to permanent cynicism. A democratic society depends on more than elections and laws. It depends on a basic belief that public institutions can, at least in principle, serve public purposes. When that belief disappears, every safeguard looks like an obstacle. Every regulation feels punitive. Every encounter with the government begins from a position of suspicion.

And perhaps that is why the anxiety surrounding immigration stayed with me long after my flight. What unsettled me was not the possibility of being questioned. It was how natural it felt to assume that being questioned meant something was wrong.

Because when distrust becomes our default response to public institutions, the problem is no longer confined to immigration counters or government offices. It becomes a question about the kind of political culture we are creating—one in which citizens no longer expect institutions to work for them, and institutions struggle to convince citizens that they ever could.