(COLOMBO) – Illegal foreign nationals in Sri Lanka have resorted to perform odd jobs in a bid to earn some extra money and the authorities are finding it hard pressed to crackdown on them owing to the lack of proper resources, officials conceded on Friday.
It was only on Wednesday that a group of 15 foreigners overstaying their visas in Sri Lanka and performing online jobs for a living were arrested by an investigation team of the Department of Immigration and Emigration during raids in Colombo and the Dehiwala surburb.
Among those arrested eleven of them were Indians from Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Uttharakhand, Gujarat and Maharashtra states and others Nepalese aged between 20 and 30.
Initial investigations revealed that some of them had arrived on resident visas and others on tourist visas
A senior official of the Department of Immigration and Emigration said the suspect foreigners would be further interrogated and deported after court proceedings.
An official of the Public Security Ministry said some foreigners easily pass off as locals and do odd jobs. He stressed on the need to work out a coordinated approach with the involvement of all the relevant agencies to identify them.
He said the recent arrest was only the tip of the iceberg and that the problem was wide and extended to nearly all parts of the country.
Wealthy land owners in the pre-dominantly Tamil speaking provinces in the North and East of the country are also known to bring down South Indians on tourist visas who later work as hired hand on their farms.
“This issue has remained a sticky problem ever since the end of the separatist conflict in 2009 and a coordinated effort is needed in a bid to combat this scourge”, a senior Government official who did not wish to be named said.
