A foreigner works for a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Phu District

The Ho Chi Minh City administration will ask the government to increase fines imposed on firms that employ illegal workers by ten times.

The city will suggest fines of VND50-100 million instead, he said at a meeting held on Friday to discuss the rising number of violations related to hiring foreign workers.

A total of 16,800 foreigners are currently working in the city and nearly 3,000 don’t have labor permits, the city’s Department of Labor, Invalids, and Social Affairs estimated. Most of them are employed in footwear and textiles and garment companies.

But Le Xuan Vien, deputy head of Vietnam’s Immigration Management Bureau under the Ministry of Public Security, said the real number may be higher.

“A recent inspection by the ministry of seven companies in the city showed three quarters of 1,338 foreign workers don’t have labor permits,” he said.

Nguyen Van Xe, deputy director of the city’s Department of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, said many companies began using foreign workers before asking for labor permits while many others did not report to the authorities that they were employing foreign workers.

Nguyen Van Anh, head of the city’s Immigration Management Department, said many unskilled Africans have entered the country as tourists and stayed on to work temporarily for businesses in the city.

Some of them have asked Vietnamese people to seek investment certificates for opening restaurants, hotels, and karaoke parlours, he said.

Vien said foreign workers without permits could be expelled from the country.

He said companies that had employed foreigners for three months in Vietnam without work permits would get three more months to get them. After that, foreigners without work permits will be asked to leave, he added.

Quach To Dung, deputy director of the city’s Department of Industry and Trade, said her agency had revoked 400 of 2,398 foreign companies’ operation licenses due to different labor law violations this year.

But as no fines have been imposed on such cases, most of then have yet to close down, she said.

In the first nine months of this year, the HCMC police registered 52 crimes involving 127 foreigners.

Of them, 16 were involved in drug trafficking, 16 others in swindling and 12 in robberies. Most of the violators were from Nigeria, Turkey and some Asian countries like Iran, Korea, the Philippines and India, city police said.

Source: Thanh Nien, Agencies