Asian labor flows now regional affair

Asian labor flows now regional affair

MANILA (AFP): Despite tight restrictions, Asia's massive migrant labor force is increasingly being absorbed by the region's high-income economies, the Asian Development Bank said.

The flow has eased the tight labor markets of the host countries and helped them undertake rapid restructuring of production while complementing merchandise trade and benefiting the labor exporters, the bank said.

But the migrant labor situation has also given rise to new policy problems, the Philippines-based bank said in its annual Asian Development Outlook report last week.

"Asian migration is now chiefly intra-Asian migration, although Asia as a whole is still a net emigration area," the bank said.

The report noted that the human traffic was mainly "temporary in nature," with foreign workers engaged in short-term contracts.

It estimated there were about 1.8 million legal entrants annually to the main labor-importing countries of Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia.

There were another 1.3 million illegals or overstayers in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand, the bank said.

The Philippines was world's second-largest net exporter of labor after Mexico, with a total 4.2 million workers abroad.

Some countries such as Malaysia and Thailand exported some types of labor while importing other types. Higher income countries like Japan and Brunei were largely labor importing.

The development bank said labor migration to the high-income countries of Asia "has been strictly controlled and very selective."

There was evidence of a strong convergence on basic immigration policies that made high-income take in skilled workers for short-term employment in specific sectors, it said.

"As a result, there is a large amount of illegal immigration, primarily of unskilled workers, who flow into occupations that local residents are reluctant to fill," the study said.

This "raises an important question of the desirability of labor movements, " it said.

The bank stressed that labor movements increased the real aggregate output of goods and services in the host country more than it decreased the output in the labor exporting country.

"Intra-Asian movement of unskilled or low-skill labor may be a substitute for trade if the immigrant labor is employed in import-substituting industries," it added.

On the other hand, "restrictions on immigration of lower wage workers and the admittance of workers with skills in short supply have accelerated the movement of these industries up the technology ladder in the new labor-importing countries of East and Southeast Asia," the ADB said.