Immigration officials nabbed 76 Chinese women for allegedly working as sex workers in Indonesia in a raid they conducted at West Jakarta’s Sun City nightclub on New Year’s Eve.
While majority of the media coverage on New Year’s Eve featured the various fireworks displays across the city, Immigration officers invited reporters to cover a different show: a raid on one of West Jakarta’s nightclubs where they arrested 76 Chinese women for illegally working in the area as sex workers.
Yurod Saleh, director general of immigration enforcement, explained that his department raided the nightclub after receiving reports from the public and those gathered from their own intelligence.
Just recently, the country’s social media has been flooded with rumors about Chinese workers coming to Indonesia to steal employment from the locals. 
See: ‘Chili Conspiracy’ Rouses China-Indonesia Conflict
It has been reported that President Jokowi expressed his annoyance with the fake news that more than 10 million Chinese are already employed in the archipelago—when the real count is only at 21,000. Jokowi has already ordered police authorities to find the culprit behind the incorrect information being disseminated.
As it is, the most recent reports on the arrest of the Chinese women, whose ages ranged from 18 to 30 years old, have already been conceived by many as a validation on the fast-growing anti-Chinese paranoia amongst many Indonesians.
House Commission IX vice chairman and a PAN party politician, Saleh Partaonan Daulay told reporters early this week that the above report is proof that illegal foreign workers in fact exist. He added that this can be attributed to the country’s policy (or lack thereof) of not requiring visas for tourists from other countries, including China, which allows people to easily come to the country and work.
The group of Chinese women are being held at a Tangerang immigration detention center for further investigation. Other than immediate deportation, they will most likely serve five years’ imprisonment for serious violation of Indonesian immigration regulations.
Image credits: AsianCorrespondent, KabarParlemen
