Identity and the State in Malaysia by Fausto Barlocco

Author:Fausto Barlocco [Barlocco, Fausto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781317932390
Google: mU9JAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 19352312
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

Immigration in Sabah

According to the general perception shared by most Sabahans I spoke to,4 the immigrant population has, over the years since the 1970s, come to constitute a significant proportion of the state’s population. Supporting this perception, an international academic, Kamal Sadiq, argues (2005: 108) that ‘almost one in every three residents of Sabah may be a foreigner’, including both illegal immigrants and legal workers, questioning the data presented in the 1991 census, which, according to him, seriously underestimated the number of foreigners, especially Filipinos. More recent official statistics (Malaysian Department of Statistics 2005, cited in Leete 2007), on the other hand, give the proportion of non-citizens as 24.8 per cent of Sabah’s population.

Azizah Kassim (1998, cited in Sadiq 2005: 107) reports that a former Chief Minister estimated the number of foreigners to be between 400,000 and 500,000, while the leaders of PBS estimate a figure of one million foreigners out of a population of 2.8 million on the basis of the unpublished Transient Population Study they carried out in 1988, during the period the party was in power; similar estimates are given by Filipino sources (Sadiq 2005: 108).

These accounts are notably consistent with the dramatic population growth experienced by Sabah since the 1980s, with an annual 5.5 per cent against a Malaysian average of 2.6 between 1981 and 1991, and of 6.2 compared with the Malaysian 2.7 between 1991 and 1995, with a growth rate of almost three times that of other states. Comparing Sabah with neighbouring Sarawak, which has similar fertility and death rates, it is possible to see that, while the latter had a larger population in 1980, the estimated population of the two states according to the Seventh Malaysia Plan (1995–2000) are 2.06 million for Sarawak and 3.3 million for Sabah, with about 1.3 million more people (Kadiq 2005: 109).

If these figures are contrasted with the unpublished data from the state immigration reported by Azizah Kassim (1998, cited in Sadiq 2005: 107) of only 120,719 alien workers registered in Sabah in 1997, it is easy to infer that a great proportion of the immigrants are illegal. Estimating the number of immigrants, and in particular illegals, is further complicated by the fact that many of them become regularised through various procedures. These are either legal, such as government programmes, marriages with local people, or the granting of refugee status, or illegal, such as the use of fake documents. As is common knowledge around Sabah, it is quite easy to obtain a fake identity card: while Sadiq (2005: 115) argues they can be obtained for as little as 10 ringgits, my local friends told me they knew the price depended on the immigrant’s origin, but generally could be around 100, and they even jokingly encouraged me to get one.

The ease with which an identity card (IC) can be obtained partly depends on the fact that the use of legal documents is rare or absent among the natives in rural areas, as people do not normally need them and might need to travel long distances or go through much hassle in order to get them.

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