By Mario Casayuran

Senator Francis N. Pangilinan sought Monday the dismissal of Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) and Bureau of Immigration (BI) appointees and officials who allowed the entry into the country of 400,000 illegal Chinese workers.

‘’File criminal cases against them. Uphold the rule of law and without fanfare deport these illegals,’’ Pangilinan, president of the opposition Liberal Party (LP), said.

Pangilinan said the Duterte administration should not be afraid of China in the face of hundreds of thousands of their citizens here illegally.

‘’What it should fear is the anger of millions of our people who remain jobless while we give special treatment to these Chinese illegals,’’ he stressed.

But President Duterte does not favor deporting Chinese illegal workers.

The President, in a recent speech during a political campaign by his PDP-Laban party in Laguna, said that the number of illegal Chinese workers in the country “equals” the number of undocumented Filipino workers in China.

He said he could not simply tell the Chinese illegal works to simply leave the Philippines because there are some 300,000 Filipino workers in China.

The Philippine consulate-general in Hong Kong earlier estimated that there are 200,000 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) working as maids in mainland China.

Most of these were recruited from Hong Kong.