PENAMPANG: When children here go to school, others come out to play in the Kampung Puluduk area here almost every other day.

These children of migrant workers walk down from their homes, which lie hidden behind thick bushes on a ridge that stretches along several housing estates and apartment complexes in the area.

Such squatter colonies will prove to be an uphill task for the authorities in their massive swoop to track down illegal immigrants across the state this month.

In Puluduk, there are several clusters of squatter houses on the ridge which separates the Penampang Sports Complex and the residential area.

Its residents, mostly foreigners, use a network of footpaths to move about the ridge.
They can be seen early in the morning when they leave for work and late in the evening when they return.

Taman Penampang resident W. K. Yung said the foreigners began occupying the ridge when developers began constructing several new housing estates and apartment complexes over the last decade.

This included new apartments such as Regency, Taman Penampang II and Taman Puluduk as well as the new school (SK Dompokuan) and the education department building (training and extra curricular division).

"I believe these were the workers who worked at the sites and stayed on after the project finished," said Yung, a hawker.

He said the authorities had launched several raids in the past but the migrants later returned.

Yung, who bought his home in 1984, estimated that there were at least seven to eight clusters of squatter houses along the ridge, which is linked to the Beverly Hills Apartment Complex 3km away.

The hawker used to walk along the paths on the ridge with his children in the evenings or on weekends.

"The paths were probably there to connect the villages in the area in the olden days. But these days, I don't even dare to let my grandchildren out from the house for fear of being harmed by the foreigners."

In Kota Kinabalu, there are also several squatter colonies built in the cover of thick bushes and mangrove trees. Migrant workers can be seen walking in and out of an area along a monsoon drain behind the Sabah Trade Centre in Likas every day.

Sabah Police Commissioner Datuk Mohd Noor Ibrahim said police had identified their targets, and were monitoring the immigrants closely before the swoop got under way.