He wants to urge the Agong to convene a Royal Commission on Immigration Reform to thoroughly deal with the deep- seated immigration problems facing the country. “It’s time we stop the rot.”
The MP warned that immigration was in a very critical state with two to three million undocumented migrants in the country. “Malaysia, for the last 16 years, rated poorly in the annual US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report.”
“Terrorism-related travel was posing a serious threat to security.”
Billions of ringgit were poured into the blackhole that’s the “Malaysia Migrant Industrial Complex” only to have the problem worsen over the years, he reminded. “The cycle repeats with more lucrative contracts dished out to cronies on the pretext of solving earlier problems.”
He was commenting on media reports that an immigration system upgrade on the cards could cost up to RM6 billion. The whole project will be divided into smaller packages over a period of time. The first phase was estimated to cost between RM400 million to RM500 million.
In fact, the Home Ministry had already signed an agreement with a company, Prestariang Bhd, to implement an overall system upgrade codenamed SKIN, Sistem Kawalan Imigresen Nasional (National Border Control System). “That was eight months ago,” fumed Sim.
Prestariang joins the exclusive and lucrative club of a handful of private contractors supplying key services to the Immigration Department. When the contract was signed in November 2015, one financial house reported that “Prestariang’s investment in SKIN will amount to RM1 billion or more”.
He recalled that he had previously written about “the Malaysia Migrant Industrial Complex”, a multi-billion ringgit industry benefiting an exclusive club alone.
He cited the key problems with the club.
Multi-million contracts were awarded, without open tender, mostly to companies with close links to the ruling party.
Poor performance of the systems implemented caused various violations of immigration laws over the years.
Most of the companies have overlapping roles, some merely performing paper-shifting “middleman” work, while raking in multi-million profits.
Projects were carved out to different vendors as if to reward different cronies with contracts. “This inevitably caused poor system integration,” said Sim.
Such problems were admitted by HeiTech Padu, the contractor for MyIMMS, he pointed out. “One of the reasons for the failure of the system was because of the integration between different systems and vendors.”
About two months ago, the authorities busted an insider syndicate in the Immigration Department which had been sabotaging the computer system called the Malaysia Immigration System (MyIMMS) to allow illegal entry into Malaysia.
Another immigration system, NERS, may have potentially been breached to allow about 718,000 suspicious foreigners to enter the country in 2013.
The MyEG online migrant worker permit renewal system had breached immigration laws by illegally renewing almost 9,000 migrant workers in 2013 and 2014.
All these systems, summed up Sim, were provided by private contractors who were awarded contracts without open tender.
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