KOTA KINABALU: Without an effective solution, the stateless may be half of population in Sabah by 2030, warns Dr Chong Eng Leong, an expert on illegal immigrants.

The number of people without documentation and stateless is rising each year, said the Parti Warisan leader.

According to census conducted by the Statistics Department in 2020, non-citizens in Sabah made up of 810,000 but these are holding work permits, refugees and foreigners with documents and do not include illegal immigrants.

Based on the data he has collected for years, the stateless and those without documentation have reached 2 million.

Without an effective solution, Dr Chong said the number of stateless would continue to surge drastically.

“Currently, there are 2.6 million citizens in Sabah. By 2030, the illegal immigrants who are not listed in the census may reach 50% of population in Sabah. Their numbers are the same with the number of citizens in Sabah,’’ he said.

Dr Chong said this at the Colloquium On Identity Issues in Sabah: Bridging Realities and Catalysing Change organised by Human Rights Commission of Malaysia on 12 November.

He suggested the government to offer temporary resident card to the stateless for a five-year period so that they can work.

He claimed that the Identity Card Project had granted many citizens through an improper channel and suggested the government to consider revoking the citizenship of those granted by the project.

Nevertheless, he suggested the children and grandchildren of those granted with the citizenship under the project should be accepted as citizens as they are born in Sabah.

“They should not be penalised although their parents had received citizenship under the project,’’ he said.

Dr Chong, former Senator and Author of “Population. Explosion and Demographic Shift in Sabah”, also criticised the slow pace of digitalising the number of foreign immigrants.

The data collection, which started in September 2022, registered less than 40,000 immigrants as of April this year.