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Family life, ‘illegality’ and the vagaries of documents in Sabah, East Malaysia

Catherine Allerton

Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics

Paper presented in panel on “Migration, ‘Illegality’ and Citizenship in Contemporary Malaysia”, Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, Philadelphia, 29 March 2014

Since its formation in 1963, Malaysia has been ‘an important node in regional and global human mobility’ (Nah 2007: 39). In the late twentieth century, the country embarked on a series of modernization projects, and began to experience strong economic growth. Continued economic transformations have required a steady supply of foreign labour from surrounding poorer countries, and today Malaysia is home to the largest number of non-citizens in Southeast Asia. However, a high proportion of these immigrants live in one state, Sabah, in the north of the island of Borneo. Foreign workers in Sabah predominantly originate from the Southern Philippines and from eastern Indonesia. Many Muslim Filipinos arrived in the state in the 1970s as refugees from the Mindanao insurgency, and were later joined by economic migrants. Indonesians have also been coming to, and settling temporarily in, Sabah, for many decades. Although statistics on the numbers of migrant workers in Sabah are – for both practical and political reasons – extremely difficult to come by, most recent estimates suggest that the state is home to almost two million foreign workers, of whom over 1 million are ‘irregular’ (Hugo 2012: 405). However, even this figure does not include the non-working dependants of foreign workers, with whom this paper is mostly concerned.

My current research concerns the children and grandchildren of Filipino and Indonesian refugees and migrants living in Sabah’s state capital, Kota Kinabalu. The majority of these children were born in Sabah, and many have never even visited their parents’ country of origin. Nevertheless, they are viewed as ‘foreigners’ in the state, and are unable to access Malaysian government schools. The children I know, and with whom I conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork, are a heterogeneous population, aged between 10 and 19, and of mixed ethnicity, religion and legal status. Many of these children have no documents, not even birth certificates, and are at risk of statelessness. A minority have valid passports and visas sponsored by a parent’s employer. Nevertheless, as the children of migrants living in a society brimming with anti-migrant prejudice, they faced many similar experiences.

Before I consider the production of illegality in this context, let me give a brief sense of how it is experienced by children and their families. In Kota Kinabalu, uniformed and plain clothes police frequently carry out spot-checks on identity documents in areas known to be frequented by migrants, and on public transport. Areas of squatter housing, or workers’ housing attached to factories, can also be sites for such ‘checking’, often in ‘operasi’ coordinated by the immigration department. Ramlah, a Bugis teenager, recounted her childhood memories of living in an area of KK where there were almost continual police checks:

‘They usually came without warning. They would knock on every house and they would ram the door open if the tenants were too slow opening it. Yes, they would kick the door. They would ask for documents, and sometimes they would go into the rooms. If people didn’t have documents they would arrest them and send them to the Police Station. There were also times during the checking that we were asked to go to the field and were asked to gather and sit in the tent they set up.’

Ramlah herself has always been legally documented. Nevertheless, as a child of migrants living in an area of ‘migrant housing’, these ‘checking’ raids were a regular aspect of her childhood. Emanuel, a 16 year-old boy with parents from Adonara, has spent his entire childhood living in cramped accommodation next to the chicken farm where his father works. He told me that he had experienced checking ‘plenty of times,’ especially when he was younger and undocumented. When it happened, he said, he and his siblings

‘ran and hid ourselves in the chicken coops. It was really horrible. We didn’t have any passport at that time. There was one time when I was 9 years old. We had our dinner at 7 o’clock and then at 8 o’clock we ran and hid ourselves.’

Many children had experiences of hiding in their house or running into the forest during such operations. Indeed, children’s awareness of ‘checking’ means that, when asked what they are worried about, or what they don’t like about their lives, they frequently mention being ‘scared of the police’ or that there are ‘too many police’. Many children are not aware of the differences between police officers, immigration officials and members of RELA, the People’s Volunteer Corps, whose involvement in immigration raids is notoriously violent (Hedman 371; Nah 2011). Thus, for children of migrants, polis comes to stand as shorthand for anyone in a uniform. In addition, fear of polis often goes hand-in-hand with a kind of morbid fascination. This is particularly the case for boys, many of whom told me they wanted to be policemen when they were older, in order to arrest thieves and drug dealers. The everyday realities of illegality also make for much humour. Once, after visiting a learning centre for the children of Filipinos, four girls asked me to drop them off at the prayer hall inside their settlement. Their male friend Amal came to say goodbye and, as he shut my car door, told me, ‘take them to the police station!’ Similarly, on another occasion, I visited a small brick factory to meet Indonesian child workers. As many teenagers gathered in a tiny worker’s house to talk to me, I heard one of them say, ‘this house has become a police station.’

In addition to their awareness and experience of ‘checking’, a few children had experienced arrest. Rita, a Bugis girl, told me that when she was 7 she was arrested with her 12 year-old brother. She said they were just sitting in a computer shop when they were arrested, and were taken and held somewhere (she cannot remember what kind of place it was) for two nights. After that, their mother came for them and they were let out. Rita cannot really say why she was arrested, though she remembers that she cried all the time.

A more common experience for children is the arrest of a parent or other family member. During my fieldwork, Rudy’s mother, an Indonesian woman from Tana Toraja, was arrested during an immigration operation, and was subsequently held for 13 days at a detention centre known as ‘the red house’ (rumah merah). As Rudy recounted, his mother did have a passport and her visa was ‘in process’ with a working agency. However, the immigration officials insisted on seeing her original document, rather than the copy she was carrying, and detained her until the agency released her passport.[i] In some groups of children I knew, nearly all of their fathers, and several of their mothers, had experienced arrest. In addition, many children told me of the arrest and detention of their siblings, cousins, uncles and aunts. Jony, who is half-Suluk, half-Visayan, recounted:

‘There were many times we experienced ‘checking’. There was this one time when my mother got arrested. That time she did not have a passport but my father had one. She had to hide. My father asked the police to arrest him but the police refused to do so because he had a passport. They threatened my mother that they would take us children to the police station if she didn’t come out. She had to come out. I was still very young back then. I just cried.’

Jony told me that his mother used to have an IMM13 card, which allowed her to live and work in Sabah, but that she lost this after she was ‘scammed’. Looking after his younger siblings, and working on a casual basis selling snacks and other foodstuffs, she has still not been able to ‘legalise’ her status, and Jony worries about her and the possibility that she might be deported. Moreover, his own and his mother’s experiences make him aware of the vagaries of documents and police power. He told me:

‘I can’t feel Malaysian because I don’t have an IC. The police here are bad. My mother was arrested once and they were asking for a bribe. They asked for 100 ringgit. But they lied to her, because after she paid, she was still arrested.’

Whilst it is crucial to pay attention to how illegality is experienced, particularly by children, we also need to understand how historically specific illegalities are produced. From an early position in the 1970s when immigration was very loosely regulated, the laws and regulations concerning the employment of foreign workers in Malaysia have gradually been tightened, and punishments for ‘illegality’ made more severe[ii]. Such penalties include large fines, imprisonment, whipping and deportation. In 2002, the government reformed the Migration Act, resulting in a zero-tolerance policy towards undocumented migrants[iii]. This was immediately followed by several, large-scale ‘crackdowns’ on undocumented workers, often as part of specific, named ‘operations’. Such crackdowns are part of a distinctively Malaysian construction of ‘illegality’, in which mass deportations are followed by industry-specific labour shortages and recruitment drives (Nah 2012: 489).

Malaysian citizenship laws, like those of many states, do not adhere to the principle of jus soli, or citizenship by birth. In the eyes of the Malaysian state (as well as many ordinary Malaysians), a Sabah-born child of migrants is herself considered an immigrant, and may inherit the vagaries of her parents’ legal position[iv]. Moreover, when we consider the regulations surrounding the employment of foreign workers, we see that the children of migrants occupy a highly problematic structural position. Malaysian immigration policies assume that migrant labour is ‘fluid’ and unattached, entering temporarily and moving out once conditions have changed (Hugo 2004: 65; Pillai 1999: 189). According to employment regulations, unskilled or semi-skilled foreign workers (in clear contrast to ‘expatriates’) are not allowed to marry whilst they are in Malaysia, nor are they allowed to bring their families into the country with them. In some senses, then, the very presence of the children of migrants is an illegal, and certainly a socially illegitimate one. Migrants are simply not supposed to have children in Malaysia. This is reflected in wider government policy, particularly with regard to schooling. Before 1997, all children were entitled to attend Malaysian primary schools, regardless of nationality, provided they held a birth certificate. But from that year onwards, ‘foreigner’ has been written on the birth certificates of children of non-Malaysian parentage[v], and since 2002, schools have ceased to accept ‘foreign’ children.

This illegal presence, or social illegitimacy, of the children of migrants in Sabah complicates the analysis of citizenship and undocumented migration in the state. The literature on illegality and undocumented workers has not had much to say about children, or about family life, in part because it has tended to be focused on those who have actually migrated, rather than those born into a condition of illegality. Yet, in Sabah, ‘illegality’ is differently constituted and experienced through the lifecycle. In particular, the prohibitions preventing foreign workers having a family life mean that children born in Sabah potentially experience a double illegality – the initial illegality of their birth, and the further illegality of their lack of documents.

In public discourse in Sabah, there is an occasionally hysterical atmosphere of illegality, in which all ‘foreigners’, whatever their actual legal status, are branded as ‘illegals’. During my fieldwork, this atmosphere of illegality was heightened by two, specific events. The first of these was the setting-up of a Royal Commission of Inquiry on the presence of illegal immigrants in Sabah. This Royal Commission had long been demanded by Sabah-based political parties, who hoped to finally clarify the existence of what is referred to as ‘Project IC’: the rapid granting of citizenship to Muslim immigrants in majority Christian Sabah as a way to bolster electoral support for the ruling coalition. However, the daily public interest generated by the evidence of Immigration officials or politicians did not particularly influence the lives of the migrants I knew. By contrast, the second event had a very tangible and terrifying influence. This is what has become known as the ‘Lahad Datu standoff’. In February 2013, over 200 self-professed followers of the Sultanate of Sulu, some of them armed, entered Malaysia from the Philippines and holed up in the remote village of Tanduo. These followers, who apparently hoped to reassert the territorial rights of the Sultanate in North Borneo, were subsequently encircled, bombed and killed or arrested by Malaysian security forces. In the process, 9 Malaysian security personnel were also killed.

This event further muddies the waters in which migrant ‘illegality’ is constituted in Sabah. During and after the time of the Lahad Datu standoff, spot-checks of documents on buses were stepped up. However, in many of these operations, people of Suluk descent were specifically targeted. Indonesian migrants and Sabahans who witnessed these checks, as well as Suluk children I knew, told me that some Suluk people were having their identity documents destroyed – often in front of them with scissors – by the police[vi]. One Suluk man told me that IMM13 identity cards, originally issued to Filipino refugees, were no longer being accepted as ‘legitimate’ identification by police. In other words, some Suluk people were finding themselves constituted as ‘illegal’ through illegal and racist actions by the authorities. Many Suluk children and teenagers became extremely fearful of checking at this time, whilst others hid their ethnicity, trying to pass as Malay or Bajau.