Unwanted migrant workers

At midnight tonight (July 31), time will be up for the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Indonesians attempting to eke out a living in Malaysia -- a living they have not been able to find in their own homeland.

As of midnight harsh new laws will come into effect in Malaysia that threaten "illegals" -- or undocumented migrant workers from neighboring countries such as Bangladesh, the Philippines, India and Indonesia -- caught in the country with penalties including caning, imprisonment and heavy fines.

Under threat of such cruel penalties, about 200,000 Indonesian workers were reported by the end of last week to have taken advantage of an amnesty offered by the Malaysian government to leave the country before the deadline expires. Indonesian officials in Jakarta, too, were reported to be doing all they could to repatriate the unfortunate workers.

How many illegal Indonesian workers there are, or were, in Malaysia is obviously not precisely known. After all, they are "illegals" who have slipped into the country by either air, sea or land, without documentation.

Whatever the case may be, and however many of them there may be, their cases are tragic. The most tragic thing about it all, of course, is that their own homeland, Indonesia, has proven unable to provide these people with a decent livelihood. If this was true even in the best of times, it is even more so after the Asian financial crisis hit more than five years ago and plunged Indonesia into a catastrophe that can truly be called multidimensional.

On the other side of the coin, Malaysia's desire to protect its own labor force and keep wages on an even keel is understandable enough given the circumstances prevailing in the world. Nevertheless, the wisdom of treating illegal or undocumented immigrant workers with such harshness must be questioned.

Traditionally, people on both sides of the border that separates Malaysia from Indonesia have crossed these borders for many generations. More to the point in the present case, though, is that in the longer run Malaysia's act of forcing hundreds of thousands of people back to their own countries will not benefit that country or for that matter the region.

Poverty breeds trouble and an Indonesia that is destabilized by trouble certainly cannot benefit either Malaysia or the region. Rather than forcibly sending migrant workers home, Kuala Lumpur could do better by talking the situation through with its neighbors.

As for Jakarta, the current plight of Indonesian "illegals" in Malaysia had better be a wake up call to its leaders to the great urgency of putting its own house in order.