Big illegals headache for Sabah

KOTA KINABALU, Aug 30 — Malaysia is mounting its toughest crackdown in years against thousands of illegal immigrants in Sabah.

The human flood has come in through the highly porous borders that the eastern state shares with its poorer neighbours, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced the deportation drive in late June and the round-ups began this month, giving the “illegals” plenty of warning to leave. But few believe that forced repatriations offer a concrete solution to stemming the flood. Many of those now facing an uncomfortable spell in detention and deportation will likely try to slip back, as they have in the past crackdowns.

Estimates vary on how many illegals are in Sabah, though the official estimate is between 130,000 and 150,000.

A leading authority on the issue believes it is far higher. Dr Chong Eng Leong, a former politician and surgeon by profession, has been studying Sabah's population censuses, electoral rolls and data on identity cards for the past decade.

“To understand our predicament, you have to know something about Sabah's
population development,” he said.

It has risen 300 per cent since 1970, nearly three times faster than in neighbouring Sarawak, he noted.

Furthermore, migrants have dramatically changed Sabah's demographics. A quarter of the state's population of around three million, fully 750,000, are foreigners. Of that number, Dr Chong reckons that far more than 400,000 of them are here illegally.

A mix of economic and political factors have opened Sabah up to immigrants from its closest neighbours.

Filipino Muslims fleeing a separatist insurgency came in the first wave in the early 1970s. And economic migrants flocked here during East Asia's stellar decade of growth before 1997's financial crisis.

The push of poverty and demand for cheap labour in Sabah's palm-oil plantations and its labour-intensive construction and manufacturing industries have kept them coming.

Red tape and fears of dealing with the authorities put many off from applying for papers. In fact, despite stiff penalties, employers often prefer to hire illegals to avoid paying government levies for hiring foreign workers.

A controversy has been simmering for years over claims that large numbers of Malaysian identity cards were given to undocumented migrants in exchange for votes in the 1980s and 1990s.

Residents of Sabah blame the illegals for crime and all kinds of social problems.

“People here are really fed up; they feel there's no end to the problem,” said a journalist in the capital Kota Kinabalu.

The crackdown began on Aug 7 in three districts of Sabah. Law enforcers from federal and state agencies checked nearly 12,000 individuals, detaining 393 Filipinos and 106 Indonesians.

Six days later, several hundred foreign workers were rounded up in Keningau, a logging district that relies heavily on migrant labour from Indonesia.

There have been regular evictions of illegal immigrants, but the current operation has shifted them into a higher gear. Last year, 26,332 were arrested.

Najib acknowledged that foreigners without valid papers were crossing Sabah's “rather porous” points of entry on a “free-wheeling basis”.

“So we have taken the decision to ensure tougher controls,” he told a news conference in Kota Kinabalu recently. These include fingerprinting arrested illegals using biometric readers to prevent them from returning.

New detention centres are being built in the coastal towns of Sandakan and Papar, according to reports, and the capacity of another in Tawau is being expanded. The three centres are said to hold a combined 2,500 people.

The Philippines has asked for more time to prepare for the deportations, and appealed to the Malaysian authorities to treat those caught humanely.

The severity of a 2002 clampdown — code-named Operation Wipe-out — badly strained relations for a time.

It spawned reports of Filipino babies dying in overcrowded Malaysian detention centres, and detainees alleged that they had been badly treated, causing a national furore.

There was anger in Indonesia, too, when thousands of migrants who had been pushed out of Sabah overwhelmed makeshift camps in the town of Nunukan in East Kalimantan. More than 60 people reportedly died from preventable diseases blamed on unsanitary conditions.

Around 20,000 illegal immigrants were expelled in the operation, and 200,000 made use of an amnesty period, according to Dr Chong.

Employers in Sabah warn that the latest mass deportations could damage the local economy. They are calling on the government to give undocumented workers with jobs the chance to legalise their status in a three-month window.

“Legalise them and send the rest home,” said the Federation of Chinese Associations Sabah president Sari Nuar. But for that to work, he added, levies on employing foreigners must be cut.

He estimated that only 30 per cent of the mostly Indonesians working in Sabah's palm-oil plantation industry have valid papers, and that is less than in other sectors relying on cheaper foreign labour. — Straits Times Singapore