The recent news about missing visitors in Malaysia has been reported in various media. Their numbers were arrived at by tallying the arrival and departure count made by the Immigration Department.

So why is there such a fuss over the 50,000 missing Chinese nationals? After all, according to the Immigration Department's statistics available here , some five million visitors to our country go missing each year!

For instance, in 2003 a total of 5,790,108 visitors comprising all nationalities disappeared without a trace. To see why these statistics are a joke we need to take the example of Singaporean visitors in perspective.

If we are to believe the statistics, 3.8 millions Singapore visitors to Malaysia went missing in the country in 2003. I was in Singapore in 2003 and did not notice some 90 percent of its population missing. Looking from this perspective, we can deduce some anomalies in the numbers.

One can conclude that the statistics are utterly unreliable. We can only speculate how the department got those figures but on a more serious note I think the department's IT and the operational procedure is suspect.