Some 7,000 illegal Filipino immigrants in Sabah, a territory under Kuala Lumpur that has been claimed by the Philippines and Indonesia, will be gradually deported under an agreement between the Philippines and Malaysia.
President Rodrigo R. Duterte reportedly made this announcement on Friday, saying that the decision was reached together with his Malaysian counterpart Prime Minister Dato Sri Mohammad Najib bin Tun Abdul Razak.
“We cannot expect also Malaysia to absorb them because they are not Filipino citizens,” Business World Online quoted Duterte as saying during a late-night news conference in Davao City after a two-day official visit in Kuala Lumpur.
“I said no clemency, except that give us time to…The problem there is Filipinos do not have education,” Duterte reportedly said. “And we cannot expect also Malaysia to absorb them because they are not Filipino citizens. They should be… learning our history, not the history of somebody else’s country.”
Filipinos continue to slip into Sabah illegally even though Malaysia has begun to deport them since 2000, the report said.
To accommodate the Filipinos sent back to the Philippines, he “will ask the government to intervene” by building more schools and hospitals in the southernmost part of the country.
“We will have to put up schools there,” he reportedly said, adding the government will ask the World Health Organization (WHO) to build hospitals.
“But the personnel will come from us,” he was quoted as saying by Business World Online. “The Tausugs there are helpless… most of them are Tausug but they are Filipinos and they should be attended to.”
