Yet another deadline has come and gone for undocumented foreign workers to leave Sabah under an amnesty programme that expired on May 31.

Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said employers now have up to Oct 31 to legalise the stay of such employees.

hishammuddin hussein home ministry 140409 talking “I hope the employers will take advantage of the opportunity. We understand their problems and they should reciprocate by solving their illegal immigrant worker problems,” he said.

“An integrated operation will be carried out to weed out illegal immigrants after the deadline.”

The May 31 deadline was set after an earlier deadline had been arbitrarily extended since last August.

The latest deadline - and a 50 percent discount on the levy payable - has been attributed to appeals from the timber and oil palm sectors which rely heavily on foreign workers.

Sabah Timber industry Association president James Hwong noted: “If the government stops the timber industry from importing foreign workers, its target of continued growth will not be achieved. There is no need to add to the people’s suffering.

“Locals are not willing to accept the labour-intensive jobs and besides they demand more wages. This (higher wages) is not economically viable.”

oil palm plantation The situation in the oil palm industry is similar, although the wage rate is going up. Indonesia’s fast-expanding oil palm sector in Kalimantan and Sumatra has set the benchmark for wages in Sabah.

“If this (the problem of high-cost foreign labour) is not dealt with, it will jeopardise the oil palm industry in the state,” said Bernard Giluk Dompok, the federal minister of plantation industries and commodities.

“Sabah is the main palm oil producing state in the country. The total planted area of 1.33 million hectares comprises 30 percent of the total planted area.”

Indonesian Consul-General Rudhito Widago said the problem is unresolved because local employers have been dragging their feet on paying the levy for foreign workers.

Those who do pay up have been accused of making illegal deductions from the monthly wages of workers to recoup the levies.

“In fact, it is not the employers who are paying the levy but the Indonesian workers themselves. Some employers make a lump sum deduction while others deduct a reasonable amount to be paid in monthly installments,” he said.

Arrests and deportation

Precise figures are not available on the number of undocumented foreigners still to be regularised in Sabah. One yardstick is the number regularised so far and action taken to detain and deport those who have no reason to stay in the state.

According to Immigration Department Sabah, only 48,477 had been issued with travel papers by their embassies up to May 31. This figures is said to be 20 percent of the estimated number of undocumented foreigners in the state.

sabah illegal immigrant Home Ministry figures show that the Immigration Department Sabah had arrested 364,864 undocumented immigrants from 1990-2007.

Figures from the two federal cabinet committees show that 610,104 foreigners were screened over 107 days in two phases - from Aug 7 to Dec 18 last year and from Feb 23 to May 31 this year. The 65 operations covered 701 areas.

Of those screened, 312,837 were confirmed to be undocumented, while 57,197 were refugees. The rest were identified as documented workers and visitors.

Although the undocumented immigrants have since been registered by the Immigration Department, only a fraction of them have been regularised due to slow payment of levies and questions over their legal status as nationals of other countries.

Head of the Special Task Force in the Prime Minister’s Department, Misri Barham, disclosed that as at Dec 31 last year, the authorities had deported 20,912 undocumented immigrants at the rate of 1,500 every month. Most of them were Filipinos and Indonesians.

Tawau, Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu were the main exit points.