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CASES of foreign workers in agriculture plantations "marrying" local native ladies in rural Sarawak without legal procedure is getting blatant, and this is exacerbating the statelessness crisis, the Society for Rights of Indigenous Peoples of Sarawak (Scrips) has warned.
Almost all of these so-called marriages are not done with the National Registration Department (NRD) and the children that are born from them end up unregistered and often without any birth certificate, said the group’s secretary general Michael Jok.
Jok told The Vibes that there are tens of thousands of foreign workers in plantations in Sarawak, especially from Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Myanmar.
"The cases of foreign men workers marrying local native ladies is getting more frequent,” he said. "These so-called marriages are almost always unregistered with the NRD.
"The couple just simply live together in the plantations and have children.
"To make matters even worse, many of the local native ladies ‘married’ to foreign workers are also without proper personal documents.”
He said that children procreated from such marriages ended up becoming a new generation of stateless people in Sarawak.
"If this is not complicated enough, most of the foreign workers who are men are usually here in Sarawak for only a few years.
"After their contracts are over, they just leave, and they also leave behind the local "wives" and children.”
The children who are stateless will in the future have enormous problems trying to convince the NRD that they are indeed born in Sarawak and are not illegal migrants, Jok stressed.
"Such is the complexity and sheer magnitude of the statelessness situation in Sarawak,” he said.
Preventative laws needed
Jok said that the state government must seriously consider enacting strict laws preventing foreign workers coming to Sarawak on contract basis from marrying locals without going through NRD’s processes.
He was commenting on the issue of stateless folks who are desperately trying to register themselves with the NRD mobile units that have been deployed to several locations in Miri and Belaga districts.
He asserted that statelessness is increasing every year as already stateless adults get "married" and produce children without solving their citizenship woes first.
In Miri city, hundreds of stateless folks had turned out daily from November 20 to 30 to meet the mobile teams at the Miri Civic Centre, but most of them could not register with the NRD counters due to the overwhelming numbers that turned up.
Sarawak United Peoples Party secretary general Datuk Sebastian Ting had expressed shock with the sheer number of stateless folks who had come to Miri for registration.
He acknowledged that the statelessness situation is much worse than anticipated by the state government.
Ting said he is preparing a report to the higher-ups in state government and Putrajaya to see how they can be more effective and thorough in their outreach to seek out the stateless.
On July 24, the special joint committee on citizenship registration for stateless Sarawakians formed by the state and federal governments were told to be more aggressive in seeking out those in rural Sarawak who are without a birth certificate and an identity card.
Home Minister Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail had said that he wants to see more mobile units deployed into the remote interiors.
There are as many as 6,000 rural longhouses and remote scattered villages throughout Sarawak, a state as big as the whole of Peninsular Malaysia. Many of them still do not have proper road links with the outside world. – The Vibes, December 9, 2023