Malaysia Readies a Crackdown on Illegal Workers
International Herald Tribune
October 7, 1996
Michael Richardson

A decade of rapid economic growth has provided abundant jobs and rising living standards in Malaysia, but it has also created for some an unwelcome side-effect: a flood of illegal migrants smuggled in by land and sea, mainly from Bangladesh and Indonesia.

While Malaysia has a population of 19 million and an acute labor shortage, nearby Indonesia, with close to 190 million people, and Bangladesh, with 115 million, cannot create nearly enough jobs to end high unemployment.

Malaysia, which offers foreign workers better wages than they can get at home, has become an irresistible magnet.

But as the number of illegal migrants in Malaysia has swollen to over a million in a total work force of only 8 million, they have been increasingly blamed by officials and other critics for rising social tensions, crime and disease.

A special committee of the Malaysian cabinet was to meet Monday to consider public complaints and calls for tighter controls.

Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad has said the country can no longer afford to be overdependent on foreign workers who were causing social ills.

"The problem is already taking its toll," he said, citing village leaders who "complain of girls running off with their foreign boyfriends, unwed mothers being ditched by their partners and wives abandoning their families to elope with foreigners."

As a result of the clamor, Indonesia said Thursday that, at the Malaysian government's request, it would bring home thousands of illegal workers.

Abdul Latief, the Indonesian manpower minister, said in Jakarta that he had recently visited about 5,000 Indonesians being detained in camps by the Malaysian government for illegally entering the country.

"Some will be allowed to return to work there if Malaysian businessmen want to employ them," he said. "But the rest, who have no skills, are illiterate, too young or sick" would have to return to Indonesia.

Many Malaysian employers contend that without foreign workers, most of whom work on construction sites, plantations and in factories, they would go out of business.

Malaysian officials said that many illegal migrants were smuggled into the country by sea, often in fishing boats, by syndicates based in Indonesia and Bangladesh.

Social workers said that some Bangladeshis earned as little as 300 ringgit ($110) a month after paying at least 10 times that amount to agents who arranged their employment in Malaysia.

Alan Dupont, a fellow at the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at the Australian National University in Canberra, said that unscrupulous entrepreneurs, some with criminal connections, were cashing in on the growing demand for migrant labor in Malaysia and other high-growth economies of East Asia.

"The existence of substantial illegal migrant communities exacerbates existing ethnic and social tensions and increases demands on already scarce resources," he said. "And the persistent breaching of territorial, customs and migration barriers threatens state sovereignty, which governments ignore at their own peril."

The authorities estimated that about 450,000 foreigners in Malaysia have official work permits, and more than 1 million are working illegally.

The Malaysian Trades Union Congress put the number of foreign workers at closer to 3 million and said they depress wages and take jobs from Malaysians.

Megat Junid Megat Ayob, deputy home minister, announced after a recent spate of brawls between Bangladeshi and Malaysian workers that the government had decided that the permits of foreign workers who married local women would be revoked immediately "and they will be directed to leave the country with their Malaysian wives."

He said the move was intended to deter "marriages of convenience," in which foreign workers saw matrimony as a ticket to employment rights, citizenship and other benefits open only to Malaysian citizens.

Sivarasa Rasiah, a Malaysian human rights lawyer, said the government crackdown was "a complete over-reaction."

He said that adult Malaysian women should have the right to marry a person of their choice, whether local or foreign, so long as it was a voluntary marriage.

But Abdul Kadir Fadzir, deputy minister for human resources, said the government would probably reject requests by Bangladesh to let more of its workers into Malaysia.

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