Hunting the Illegals

After months of delays and post-ponements, Malaysia's long-threatened crack-down on the country's hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens kicked off with more of a whimper than a bang. As an amnesty expired last week, 30,000 enforcement officers, along with a 300,000-strong volunteer militia, scoured the nation but initially failed to turn up more than a handful of potential violators. In one nighttime raid on a building site near the capital, 300 police and immigration officials rousted sleeping workers from their dormitories and forced them to squat in rows on the ground. All proved to have documents, though half a dozen were...

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