BUTTERWORTH, Dec 24 — Hundreds of illegal immigrants have been crowding the Malaysian Immigration Department’s Penang office, here since yesterday, to seek repatriation under the ‘Back For Good’ (B4G) programme to return home without legal action.
Before this, the programme which started on Aug 1 received little response from foreigners, but as expected they waited for the last minute to apply. Some even arrived early in the morning and waited in long queues for their numbers to be called.
Penang Immigration director Muhamad Husni Mahmud said they expected a large number of foreigners to apply for the programme and opened all the counters to process their applications from yesterday until Dec 31.
“We have received and finalised the applications for foreigners wishing to apply for the B4G programme to avoid backlog as last week’s applications were too much.
“Penang’s immigration staff were also on duty until midnight and managed to process 400 applications by 12 am,” he told Bernama here today.
However, Muhammad Husni said that if there was more than that amount of applications, they would still receive and process them on the same day to prevent any delays for the foreigners involved.
He said that as of yesterday, 10,257 foreigners from 17 countries had registered at the Penang Immigration office and a revenue of RM7,179,900 had been collected.
“Out of that number of foreigners, 7,768 were men and 2,489 were women. Of the total, Indonesians registered the highest number of 4,120 people, followed by Bangladeshis (4,017), Indians (774), Myanmar nationals (650) and Pakistanis (257),” he said.
He said the foreigners would only need to present themselves at the immigration office without going through a third party and bring along a travel document with a return ticket before being blacklisted and each person will be charged RM700 for the compound and special pass.
An Indonesian Samir Sulaiman, 42, said she had come to the Penang immigration office yesterday to apply for the B4G programme, but due to the huge crowd, she had to go back and return before 6 am today.
“It is fortunate there is this programme, so I can go back home. I’ve been wanting to go back to Lombok as I miss my three children there and I had to apply at the last minute because I had to arrange for the money to pay for the compound and buy the flight ticket,” she said, adding that she had overstayed in the country since the beginning of this year. — Bernama
