Mystery of the missing 37,000 foreign students

By : Farrah Naz Karim
NST

PUTRAJAYA: Where are nearly 37,000 foreigners who came to the country to study?
Neither the Immigration Department nor the Higher Education Ministry know.

All they know is that they entered the country via the student visa but went missing soon after.

Immigration officials can only account for 29,532 foreign students.

It is understood that the “missing’ students had been illegally absorbed by the job market.
The problem came to light on Jan 1, the day after the deadline for colleges to register foreign students for the I-Kad.

Department director-general, Datuk Abdul Wahid Don, said his department and ministry would be coming down hard soon on 15 colleges at which the students had “enrolled.’

He said the colleges risked having their licences revoked and being blacklisted if they failed to "produce" these students for I-Kad registration.

The I-Kad system was implemented to help identify foreign workers, expatriates and students in lieu of passports which could be lost or damaged.

The card, equipped with 17 applications and issued free the first time, are compulsory for foreigners.

He said expatriates could apply for I-kad’s at the Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Penang, Perak, Johor Baru, Sabah, Sarawak branches by the end of the month.

As of Jan 18, 7,057 of the 36,554 expatriates in the country had received their cards.

He said it would take only seven days to obtain approval.

Wahid said earlier that the colleges had been giving dubious excuses for the absence of the students, including that they had returned to China for the Chinese New Year holidays.