THERE are some 500,000 inland foreigners, a category made up of refugees, those who have overstayed and stateless children, in Sabah, said state National Registration Department (JPN) director Ismail Ahmad. 

This category of foreigners posed a bigger problem for state authorities, compared with illegal immigrants, said Ismail.

“Illegal immigrants, they’re actually a small group. We pick them up and we ship them out,” he told a law conference in Kota Kinabalu today.

Due to the the inland foreigners’ lack of documents, they often get mistakenly detained by authorities.

Recent JPN data have showed that there are 2,894,984 people in Sabah, 44,482 of which are permanent residents and 24,605 have temporary resident visas, Ismail said.

The Population and Housing Census Report for 2010 of the Economic Planning Unit indicated that some 27%, or 800,000 of Sabah’s population are foreigners.

However, Sabah lawmakers say there are far more illegal immigrants than the reported 800,000.

Ismail said apart from keeping illegal migrants out, authorities also face difficulty in monitoring and keeping track of inland foreigners.

As an example, he said out of the half million inland foreigners living in the state, more than 50,000 hold the IMM13 pass, which grants permanent stay status and eventually, citizenship, mainly to Muslim Filipino immigrants or refugees who fled the southern Phillipines decades ago.

Many of these foreigners were unable to renew their passes when the state government temporarily halted the programme in 2013, thus making them undocumented migrants.

Sabah Immigration director Musa Sulaiman said at the conference that while there were more than 90,000 registered IMM13 pass holders, only 50,000 renewed the pass annually.

“So far there has been no study to find out the whereabouts of the remaining 40,000 IMM13 holders.

“In the last 50 years since the IMM13 was introduced, many of them may have passed away or gone home,” said Musa.

The government in 2013 stopped issuing the IMM13 pass for children of Filipino refugees (who fled to Sabah following the civil war in the Philippines in the late 1960s and 1970s)  following security concerns, among other reasons.

However, the government recently decided to accept applications for the pass from children of IMM13 holders as a way to resolve the problem of stateless children in Sabah. – November 16, 2018.