Time to wean ourselves from over-reliance on 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.