ISLAMABAD Interior Minister Rehman Maliks intimidation to the illegal immigrants to vacate the country within a fortnight or be ready to face the action could be proved a superfluous claim. On one hand, the Minister seems determined to purge the country of illegal immigrants while, on the other, civic bodies of his government are all bent to facilitate the illegal immigrants, apart from the registered ones. According to the details, Capital Development Authority (CDA) allocated a piece of land for 3,000 registered Afghan nationals living in the slums of Islamabad, earlier in December last year. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had issued a press release in this regard saying that the said number of registered Afghans would be shifted from slums to the allocated land very soon. Apparently, the land has been selected to facilitate those 3000 Afghan nationals who have been registered and are issued Proof of Registration (PoR) cards by NADRA. However, the ground realities reveal that amid intensive intermingling of registered and non-registered Afghans, it is virtually impossible to separate the registered immigrants from illegal ones. Due to certain deficiencies in registration process, apathy of immigrants to go for registration, and involvement of majority of immigrants in criminal activities, only 3,000 Afghans have been registered in the Capital who carry the status of legal expatriates while on a rough estimate, over 10,000 illegal immigrants are sheltering here, with the collective number of unregistered Afghans in the twin cities being in 15,000 to 20,000. Pointing to certain flaws in registration process, a senior UN official told this newspaper that there were numerous families whose some members were registered while others were not. He said that the relocation of registered Afghans from slums to the allocated land was a flawed process, for illegal immigrants would also be relocated with the registered ones. It is imprudent to say that you would move registered Afghans to any specific land when majority of their own family members is not registered. How could you expect a few people to live separately with other members of their families living at a different place? he asked. A CDA representative told this correspondent that CDA had served notices to illegal Afghans sheltering in slums to vacate the occupied lands but after intensive consultations with UNHCR followed by a series of high-level meetings between UNHCR and CDA, the civic body had finally allocated a land for Afghan refugees near Motorway adjacent to Kashmir Highway. The official said that the problem of illegal immigrants was a decade-old phenomenon and it could not be fixed in a fortnight. There might be certain loopholes and illegal immigrants might be relocating with registered Afghans but this problem could be addressed with the 'passage of time, he added. When asked how it is possible to tackle the problem with the passage of time, the representative said, Awareness campaign for registration can be the key to reduce the number of illegal immigrants. According to UNHCRs data, only the registered Afghans, who are 3000 in number, have been relocated, but this newspapers information indicates that the number of Afghan expatriates is much greater due to the presence of illegal immigrants and absence of any evident monitoring system in newly allocated piece of land.