KL faces difficulties with foreign workers

KL faces difficulties with foreign workers

By Stefan Klein

SINGAPORE (DPA): In the good old days when the terms "bankrupt" and "unemployment" were still unknown in the southeast Asian boom countries, Malaysia saw fit to erect a potent symbol of its rise to glory. And so they constructed the highest building in the world in the middle of Kuala Lumpur.

Those who built it were Bangladeshis, Indonesians and Filipinos -- badly-paid foreigners who did all the jobs that the locals did not deign to perform.

At the peak of its development, the Malaysian economy attracted two million foreign workers, almost half of whom were illegal. The government turned a blind eye, for while there was a shortage of jobs in Europe, it was the other way round in southeast Asia: there were more jobs there than workers to do them.

Soon, 80 percent of Malaysia 700,000 building-site workers were foreigners. It was the same story in Thailand, where the boom drew in more than a million foreign workers.

Now the wave is supposed to roll back again. The once welcome helpers of yesterday have become parasites with the advent of the great depression, depriving locals of jobs and the main scapegoats for rising criminality and increasing of social ailments.

This is the message coming from several countries whose governments plan to send hundreds of thousands of foreign workers back to their countries of origin to free up jobs for local workers.

The main motive for this must be viewed as populist. In Thailand the numbers of unemployed could reach two million this year, in Malaysia one million. By clearing their markets so demonstratively of foreign competition the governments make a good impression.

But beyond this the measures make little sense -- on practical grounds alone. Illegal aliens are hard to catch and having them rounded up and sent to deportation camps -- which is what the Thai government plans -- unavoidably raises human rights questions. And once deported, they can easily return.

Take the Myanmar people, who make up two-thirds of all illegal foreigners in Thailand. They can return at any time, the 1,000- kilometer green border is hardly an obstacle.

It is also doubtful that the locals are eagerly awaiting the jobs made free by the expulsions. These are "3-D jobs" (dirty, difficult, dangerous) which are also poorly paid and thus belong in the foreigners' domain.

Many Thais and Malaysians shudder at the thought of having to do these jobs. Employers in the building and fishing industries, for example, are probably not too happy with their governments' plans for deportations. After all, who is easier to exploit than an illegal foreign worker?

There are also problems for the deporting countries themselves also face problems, because they putting neighborly relations at risk.

But the last word on the matter has yet to be delivered. On a state visit to Jakarta, Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad declared that there could be no question of deportations on a grand scale.