Deporting illegal migrants back to their home countries is not a solution to the influx of migrants into Malaysia, said Malaysian Community Care Foundation (MCCF) chairperson Halim Ishak.

He said this was the feedback relayed to the foundation from its volunteers and community leaders, as the group carried out a foreign migrant registration programme.

“Arresting foreigners will not resolve the real problem […] this is because when we carry out arrests, they will come back even if we send them home.

“The government has carried out amnesty and deportation programmes several times, but the problem is still there,” he told a press conference today.

He said the foundation had been documenting foreign migrants in Malaysia since April, with the aim of collecting data on illegal immigration in Malaysia and providing it to the National Security Council for further action.

He stressed that the data was important in tackling any issue, including illegal immigration.

Asked what solution he would propose to the government to tackle the issue, Halim declined to comment.

“MCCF has a few methods to tackle and resolve the foreign migrant problem, but unfortunately we cannot reveal it here,” he said.

He said this was because it was being executed by MCCF’s company MCCF Services Sdn Bhd, and MCCF had a stake there.

He also told reporters that the registration programme had documented some 15,000 foreign migrants so far. Most of them originated from Indonesia, followed by Bangladesh, Myanmar and Vietnam.

There were 34 nationalities that had been documented so far, plus those who were stateless.

He said the government believed there were about 6.7 million foreign migrants in Malaysia, and he believed that there might be more.

“But who can give certainty to the actual figure? It can only be done through a census,” he said.

Halim also announced that MCCF was no longer engaging the data system services of Paradise Data Analytics Sdn Bhd.

Since Nov 18, he said MCCF had replaced the system with the Foreign Immigrant Directory (FID) provided by Medutech Sdn Bhd and implemented by MCCF Services Sdn Bhd.

Hence, he said, MCCF no longer had any ties with Paradise Data, or its affiliate Khidmat Imigran and its founder Amir Pasirin.

“We have received many reports from the communities involved in the census, which MCCF is not involved at all,” he said.

He claimed that Khidmat Imigran was supposed to discontinue its Registration, Endorsement, Certification of Foreigner (Recof) programme upon cooperating with MCCF, but did not do so.

He said MCCF would also be issuing new identity cards for foreign migrants registered under its programme, but the old cards would remain valid.