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100 Filipinos nabbed in Malaysian immigration crackdown
At least 100 Filipinos who illegally entered Malaysia have been arrested in a massive immigration crackdown begun by Kuala Lumpur this week, the Philippines foreign department said.
The Filipinos were rounded-up in Sandakan on Sabah state near the southern Philippines and face either criminal charges or deportation, department spokesman Gilberto Asuque told reporters.
"We are ready to hire lawyers for them if they will be charged," he added.
Up to half a million Filipinos live in Malaysia, many of them families of refugees who fled a separatist rebellion on the Mindanao region of the southern Philippines in the 1970s.
Manila estimates that up to 200,000 are staying there illegally.
Malaysia on Tuesday began to round-up, whip and deport hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants after a four-month amnesty.
Malaysia had estimated there were nearly a million illegal workers in the country, mostly from Indonesia but also from the Philippines, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka.
Some 382,000 took advantage of the amnesty, which started at the end of October, to depart without penalty but an estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants remain, many of whom sought jobs in the construction, plantation and service industries in the face of unemployment at home.
Officials in those industries said the crackdown had dealt a severe blow to their sectors which are heavily dependent on cheap foreign labour.
Philippines Foreign Undersecretary Jose Brillantes said about 20,000 Filipinos are covered by the Malaysian amnesty grant but only 10,000 of this group have since left Malaysia. Tens of thousands of others have gone into hiding in Sabah to elude arrest, he added.
Brillantes visited Kuala Lumpur last week to plead for the safe, orderly and humane arrest and repatriation of Filipino illegals. Malaysia had expelled thousands of Filipino workers in another crackdown in 2002, causing diplomatic tensions.
Brillantes said he negotiated a deal allowing deported Filipinos to be given another chance to work in Malaysia, especially those who voluntarily surrendered.
Meanwhile, a high-level Malaysian mission is to visit the Philippines next week to seek ways of stopping illegal immigration, the presidential palace said Wednesday.
The team is to arrive on March 7 and will meet with Philippine labor officials to discuss "ways of facilitating the repatriation of illegal Filipino migrants in Malaysia", a palace statement said.
"In this light, we appreciate the Malaysian mission as a reciprocal effort on the part of its government, and as our first concrete effort on the bilateral sphere towards effectively solving illegal migration," Deputy Labor Secretary Manuel Imson said. |
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