KUALA LUMPUR: A total of 76,477 foreigners have been checked since January as part of immigration enforcement operations at hot spots, says Home Minister Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail.
Out of that number, he said 20,207 of them did not have any documents.
He said they were repatriated to their home countries after documents were provided by their embassies.
Saifuddin Nasution also said the Immigration Department had profiled 224 hot spots in the country based on information gleaned over the years.
He said there had been 7,975 operations at several of these locations since January.
He said the operations also resulted in the detention of 456 employers for hiring illegal foreign workers.
In response to a query from Datuk Dr Nik Muhammad Zawawi Salleh (PN-Pasir Puteh) in the Dewan Rakyat, he said the nation’s immigration depots could accommodate about 19,000 detainees.
They are currently housing 13,000 of them.
Saifuddin Nasution also said 86,900 illegal migrant workers were repatriated after they voluntarily surrendered to immigration authorities.
Most of those sent back to their country of origin were from Indonesia, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, he said.
He said the authorities would compound those who surrendered before repatriating them.
Some RM40,000 was collected, he added.
Saifuddin Nasution disputed Nik Muhammad’s claim that a study by the Khazanah Research Institute showed that there were six million undocumented foreign workers in the country as of 2022.
He said he had checked with the institute, which stated that it did not carry out such a study.
On Malaysia’s visa-free travel for visits of up to 30 days from Chinese and Indian nationals, which took effect on Dec 1 last year, he said there had been 950,000 tourists from China and 443,000 tourists from India as of Jan 1 this year.
The visa exemption for Chinese visitors will be granted until the end of 2026. As for Indian nationals, the exemption will end on Dec 31 this year.
Based on immigration data, he said 40 million tourists had entered Malaysia between January last year and April this year.
Most of them entered the country via Johor and the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, he added.
