Malaysia acts to ease labor shortage

Malaysia acts to ease labor shortage

Agencies, Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia softened its immigration policy on Wednesday to help ease a labor shortage of its own making, offering work permits to foreign laborers who had sneaked into the country on tourist visas.

More than 100,000 workers from neighboring Indonesia alone have entered the country on tourist visas since January, an immigration department source has said. That was when Malaysia was gearing up for a massive crackdown on illegal labor.

The crackdown followed an immigration amnesty, during which about 400,000 illegal foreign workers quit Malaysia in return for freedom from prosecution as illegal immigrants, but the exodus caused some acute shortages of unskilled labor.

Many of those who left under the amnesty, mostly Indonesians, simply returned under a tourist visa to reclaim their old jobs.

"For now, they can register with us and they will be accepted as legal workers so long as their fingerprints are in our system," Home Affairs Minister Azmi Khalid told reporters.

Under the original amnesty, illegal immigrants were fingerprinted as they exited Malaysia and were supposed to apply in their home countries for approval to re-enter as legal workers. But this process became bogged down in Indonesia.

Only about 30,000 of them have returned by this legitimate route and Malaysia partly blamed high processing fees at the Indonesian end for the poor response. At the time, Malaysia's policy was straining ties with its bigger, poorer neighbor.

Malaysia's immigration department has also offered work permits to illegal workers who have overstayed their tourist visas -- although only to people who left under the amnesty and returned.

"I want to make clear however that only those who had registered their return during the amnesty will be given the privilege," Azmi said.

"This privilege is extended not only to Indonesian workers but to all workers of Malaysia's labor-source nations."

Malaysia relies on foreign unskilled labor to do dirty, poorly paid work that locals shun, but the number of illegal immigrants, estimated at 800,000 or more ahead of the amnesty, causes the government a fiscal and administrative headache.

They don't pay tax and add up to a big unregulated community, often living in shanty towns.

But the labor shortage has led to industry losses running into hundreds of millions of dollars and sparked fears it may exacerbate a slowdown in economic growth, which is seen at 5.0- 6.0 percent this year, down from 7.1 percent in 2004.

The departure of the illegal immigrants caused a shortage of some 200,000 workers in the manufacturing sector, 150,000 in construction, 50,000 in plantations and 20,000 in the services sector, the cabinet has been told.

In a related development, the Malay Mail reported on Wednesday that Malaysian jails were overcrowded after a crackdown on illegal immigrants, adding to a growing list of problems caused by the anti-migrant sweep.

Prisons Department official Zamzuri Ghani was quoted by the paper as saying that the nation's 52 prisons and detention centers were built to house 30,000 inmates but were holding 45,000 people, most of them illegal migrants.

The revelation came hard on the heels of an announcement that a government scheme to bring expelled Indonesian workers back into the country to fill a large labor shortage had been abandoned.

Azmi said 11 one-stop centers to facilitate the return of the workers were shut down because of a poor response.

The centers, manned by immigration officers from both countries, were set up at Indonesian border points.

The government is now looking for workers from other countries, including Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar and Vietnam. More than a thousand Pakistanis have already arrived in Malaysia out of an expected 100,000.