LOCAL communities have been urged to collaboratively shoulder the responsibility of ending Sabah’s undocumented migrant woes in the wake of the authorities’ plan to launch a massive operation to find and repatriate these foreigners, particularly those who have trespassed for economic gain.
Assistant Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Datuk Joniston Bangkuai said the security forces and enforcement agencies face a mammoth task to execute the work to ensure Sabah is rid of outsiders staying illicitly with no legitimate grounds for being in Malaysia
"Community leaders or even ordinary villagers can play their role by helping the authorities locate settlements where the culprits are, where they are wrongfully employed or even where they are being harboured,” he said.
Bangkuai, who is also PBS information chief, said that Covid-19 should no longer be used as an excuse for migrants not to obtain valid travel documents and hide in squatter colonies as safe havens.
The Kiulu assemblyman said this in response to Sabah Police Commissioner Datuk Jauteh Dikun’s revelation that many of the 538 squatter colonies identified statewide are occupied by illegal immigrants.
Most of them had entered or stayed on in the state through illegal means for economic gain.
Jauteh had said the police are working out an action plan with help from other government entities, with a focus on these colonies.
Bangkuai yesterday said the decision to carry out a massive operation to weed out the foreign trespassers from squatter settlements throughout Sabah is most apt, adding that the move would prevent the perennial problem from further getting out of hand.
"The chief minister, as the state security chairman, has always advocated the need for a continuous operation to rid Sabah of illegal immigrants.
“Every effort must be taken to ensure those who have overstayed, those who contravened their work permits, or those without any valid documents are found and sent back to their countries of origin, while punitive action is taken against locals who harbour them,” he said.
A total of 8,678 individuals were deported to their countries of origin last year, according to the Sabah Immigration Department.
Its state director Datuk SH Sitti Saleha Habib Yusoff had said there were also 1,463 operations with 4,108 people arrested in 2023.
Sitti described squatter colonies as "hotspots" and noted that such locations need integrated operations for the scourge to be cleared.
Among these illegal economic migrants, over 90,000 are Filipinos, 45,000 are Indonesians, and 5,000 hail from various other regions, including South Asia.
The town of Lahad Datu takes the lead with 130 such settlements, closely followed by Beluran with 96, Keningau with 48, and Papar with 39.
The 2022 census report by the Statistics Department revealed that foreigners constitute 22.8%, or 779,500 individuals, of the of the total residents in the state.
Some 2.663 million people, making up 77.2%, are locals among Sabah’s total population of 3.412 million.
The data also showed the population of Sabah had increased by five-fold from 653,604 people in 1970 to 3,418,785 people in 2020. – The Vibes, February 17, 2023
