RI maids in Malaysia run away to husbands

RI maids in Malaysia run away to husbands

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP): Some 450 Indonesian maids in Malaysia abscond every week to join their husbands working elsewhere in the country in what appears to be a pre-planned arrangement, a press report said Sunday.

Nearly 24,000 maids ran away last year, leaving their employers in the lurch, The Sun newspaper said.

In an operation against illegal immigrants, the immigration department in central Selangor state traced most of the missing maids to their husbands, it said.

The department's director Dahri Ibrahim was quoted as saying that many Indonesian women were using this method to enter the country to join their husbands.

"We are concerned with such arrangements and we suspect that some recruitment agencies could be involved," he said, adding that two agencies had recently been suspended while others were being screened.

In a recent raid at a construction site immigration officers were shocked to find 60 Indonesian women with valid trade documents and work permits living there.

"We discovered that they had entered the country legally and worked for about four months before running away to join their husbands," he said.

Officially, work permits have been issued to 160,000 Indonesian women to work as domestic maids but there are no statistics on how many of them are still working, it added.