Malaysia and migrant workers

Malaysia and migrant workers

Sin Chew Daily/Asia News Network, Selangor, Malaysia

Malaysians generally have a mixed feeling for illegal migrant
workers from Indonesia. We love them because they have helped
relieve the pressure of many a vital industry. However, we are
also worried that these illegal foreign workers would threaten
our social security.

Do we love them more or hate them more? It looks like even the
government finds it hard to take a decisive stance. In the end,
the government has come out with both a carrot and a stick -- the
amnesty and the arrests. While the carrot has been offered, we
have yet to see when the government will actually pick up the
stick.

With hundreds of thousands of illegal foreign workers just
leaving our shores, many industries are already feeling the
pinch. Retailers complain that their businesses have dropped
while small and medium-sized industries, hawkers and farmers
bemoan that they have lost the much needed labor force. So the
government hurriedly set up a one-stop screening center in
collaboration with the Indonesian government to allow these
workers to turn back after spending one or two days in some
Indonesian island, legally.

In fact, such a cycle of amnesty followed by arrests and more
amnesty, takes place year after year, squandering not only
valuable government resources but also eroding the government's
reliability and integrity. Besides, it also locks the country
within an antiquated operational mode whereby foreign workforce
is badly needed, and impedes the progress of economic
transformation.

Dependence on foreign workers is no doubt the easiest,
cheapest and most direct way of doing things, but that will also
stall the elevation of the values of local products as well as
R&D efforts, dampening the wills to go into automation, which in
the long run will erode the country's competitiveness.

Moreover, over-dependence on foreign workers will also
obliterate the efficiency and objectives of our enforcement units
while slapping heavy social costs onto the country, including the
welfare of these foreign workers' children. This will in turn
increase the government's burden to provide infrastructure as
well as essential services while police force has to be mobilized
to ensure social security.

It is therefore high time for the government to map out with
some definite foreign worker policies, including setting a law
for foreign workforce ratios in certain industries and services
to be cut down to 20 percent or less to better control the influx
of foreign workers.

The government's foreign worker policies have been ambiguous
all these years -- arresting illegal foreign workers on the one
hand, and generously granting amnesty on the other. And now, even
by whom the levies should be paid remains in doubt, let alone
centralized management of foreign laborers.

The government must make it a law that employers hiring
foreign workers should pay more, including the provision of
hostels which are more manageable, as well as foreign worker
management fees. This is to lessen the government's enforcement
and repatriation costs.

Unless and until the employers are made to pay a certain fee
for hiring foreign workers, they will not bother to think of ways
to boost their productivity without having to depend excessively
on imported manpower, or hire locals in their stead.

Slowing national economy must not be made an excuse for giving
up the opportunity to improve our competitiveness. If we don't
take the strategic move to change today, perhaps we will still be
talking about the same issue of illegal foreign workers 10 or 20
years down the road.