KL concerned at foreign men marrying older locals

KL concerned at foreign men marrying older locals

Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia's Immigration department has expressed concerns over the
rise in the number of marriages of young foreign men with older
local women, a news report said on Sunday.

Some of the marriages involve women more than three times the
age of the foreigners, with authorities warning that such unions
may be merely a way for the men to obtain Malaysian citizenship,
the newspaper report said.

In an incident involving a 19-year old foreign man and his 60-
year old bride, the couple had cited "love at first sight" as the
reason for their marriage, the department's spokesman Ahmad
Shukri Abdul Majid was quoted by the Malay-language Berita Harian
daily as saying.

Immigration officials have launched an investigation into the
background of the couple, including the "questionable" intentions
of the groom, Ahmad told the newspaper.

He said most of the foreigners involved were from India,
Bangladesh and Pakistan and added that the main reason given by
local women for marrying the men was that they resembled India's
Bollywood actors.

Ahmad said that such weddings would be screened by immigration
officials before they could be given the go-ahead, and said that
many cases were of foreign workers hoping to obtain a permanent
Malaysian residentship by marrying a local.

"Their tactic is to try and marry on the seventh year that
they are here, because that is the maximum period which foreign
workers are allowed to work in this country," he said.

The department also revealed that a total of 45,274 local men
had married foreign women last year, with females from Indonesia
topping the list of being the most "popular" life-partner of
choice, followed by Thailand, India, the Philippines, Singapore
and China.