A coalition of public groups has launched a campaign to collect 200,000 signatures from citizens in Malaysia’s Sabah state on Borneo island who want the government to flush out illegal immigrants, said Patrick Sindu, president of the Consumers Association of Sabah.
"People in Sabah are worried because we have been flooded by illegal immigrants," he said. "There is a population boom of illegal immigrants that affects our sovereignty and security."
According to official statistics, Sabah has one of Malaysia’s fastest-growing populations, largely due to foreign immigration from neighboring Indonesia and the Philippines.
The number of residents in Sabah increased from an estimated 1.7 million people in 1991 to 2.9 million in 2004, which included at least 723,000 registered immigrants. Police say there are also currently an additional 100,000 illegal immigrants in Sabah.
However, activists believe that hundreds of thousands of other immigrants who entered Sabah illegally over the past two decades have bribed authorities to provide them with bogus identification cards that classify them as Malaysian citizens, Sindu said.
Such cards allow the migrants — most of whom are believed to be originally from Indonesia, the Philippines, India and Pakistan — to seek permanent employment, purchase land and houses and even cast ballots in state and national elections, Sindu said.
"We hope our signature campaign will encourage the government to begin an initiative to verify the identity cards of everyone in Sabah to weed out the illegal immigrants," Sindu said. "The problem has been ignored for too long, and it will be more difficult if we wait longer."
Sabah, which has large timber and agricultural resources, shares a long, porous border with Indonesia’s Kalimantan province in Borneo. The state is also a short distance by boat from the southern Philippines, which has been plagued for years by Muslim separatist violence.
Many immigrants come to Sabah and other parts of Malaysia, one of Southeast Asia’s wealthiest nations, seeking employment in plantations, construction sites, factories and other industries to escape poverty or instability in their home countries.
In 2002, nearly 300,000 undocumented migrant laborers throughout Malaysia fled or were forced out when the government imposed new immigration laws allowing for caning, imprisonment and large fines for illegal foreign workers.