Brendon Beliku is a corporate immigration and employment compliance professional based in Kota Kinabalu. He writes independently on Sabah’s economic governance, labour policy, regulatory affairs and Momogun empowerment.
KOTA KINABALU: Sabah runs two labour migration systems that rarely speak to each other, and the silence is starting to cost the formal one credibility it did nothing to lose.
-Two Tracks, One Reputation-
The first track is the formal work permit system, issuing Employment Passes, Professional Visit Passes and foreign worker permits through documented, statutory channels. It operates under Sabah’s own retained authority over immigration and labour, distinct from Peninsular Malaysia, built for verification rather than discretion. Its population is almost entirely corporate: skilled professionals sponsored by registered companies through employer led applications.
The second track is the one the Royal Commission of Inquiry into illegal immigrants in Sabah spent years documenting, and its population has almost nothing in common with the first.
A five member panel chaired by Tan Sri Steve Shim, former Chief Judge of Sabah and Sarawak, was appointed on 6 September 2012 to investigate the allegation known as Project IC, that citizenship documents had been issued unlawfully to non citizens in exchange for electoral support.
The Commission heard 211 witnesses over hearings held January to September 2013, examining more than 5,000 pages of evidence, before submitting its findings in May 2014.
The report, made public that December, concluded Project IC probably existed. On scale, its evidence pointed to a past attempt at a fix: under the 1997 Program Pemutihan, a nationwide regularisation exercise, the government registered 463,832 Indonesian and Filipino workers across Sabah and Labuan, of whom 50,000 were found unemployed and identified for repatriation.
-A Committee, and What Happened to Its Own Fix-
The Commission’s recommendation was specific: a permanent secretariat, paired with either a management committee or a consultative council, to oversee foreign national matters in Sabah on an ongoing basis.
The government’s response, confirmed by then Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, was the Committee on the Management of Foreigners in Sabah, formed after the RCI’s December 2014 findings and split into a main committee, chaired jointly by the Home Minister and Sabah Chief Minister, and a technical committee chaired by the Deputy Chief Minister. Zahid cited 27,769 deportations from Sabah in 2015 as evidence of its seriousness.
That same committee later attempted the standardising reform the Commission had gestured toward.
In September 2019, under a different Home Minister, it announced the Sabah Temporary Pass, replacing three documents long held by foreign nationals, the IMM13 pass, the Census Certificate and the Kad Burung Burung, with a single card set for June 2020. The pass became central to the January 2020 Kimanis by-election.
After the governing coalition lost that contest, the Sabah cabinet cancelled it on 22 January 2020, and the federal Home Ministry aligned with that decision days later.
A committee capable of proposing a genuine fix, and reversing it within four months once electorally costly, has shown something concrete about its character, responsive to the political calendar in a way the Commission’s recommendation, built around permanence, was designed to avoid.
-What the Gap Still Costs-
This matters for the formal permit system because credibility in labour migration governance is assessed at the jurisdiction level, not the permit category.
A formal system can be sound in every file it processes and still absorb friction from an unresolved question next to it. Three structural responses sit on the record since 1997, the Pemutihan exercise, the 2014 committee, and the 2019 to 2020 Temporary Pass attempt.
Each was genuine effort. None has shown the standing, election proof continuity the Commission called for.
None of this suggests Sabah has lacked the will to act. The fix closest to a permanent secretariat was withdrawn within months under electoral pressure, the exact pressure a standing, insulated body would have been built to absorb.
-What This Looks Like From the Compliance Side-
Practitioners handling Employment Pass and Professional Visit Pass applications work inside a system run by the same state Immigration Department that enforces against the informal track above.
The two populations are entirely distinct in law and practice, a sponsored MNC engineer has no procedural connection to an IMM13 holder, but both are processed through shared institutional capacity.
When political attention toward the informal track intensifies, around a Commission report, a proposed reform, or an election flashpoint, the same apparatus handling corporate applications sits inside that scrutiny.
This produces a recurring advisory task: explaining to employers new to Sabah that processing timelines can shift for reasons unconnected to their own application.
A fully compliant submission does not become less compliant because of an unrelated population’s documentation status.
It can still see longer review when the same agencies face wider political pressure, since attention and capacity are shared even where the legal frameworks are not. Employers who miss this tend to misread ordinary caution as a problem with their own file.
[Disclaimer]: The views, opinions and analyses expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies or positions of the Jesselton Times, its editors, management or affiliated entities. This article is published for analytical and public discussion purposes and should not be construed as institutional commentary or endorsement.*
