KUALA LUMPUR: An acute labour crunch threatening Malaysia’s economy after the government expelled hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants highlights a failure to plan for long-term manpower needs, analysts and industry experts say.
“There is no medium to long-term approach to address the twin problem of illegal immigrants and a labour shortage,” said Abdul Razak Baginda of the Malaysian Strategic Research Centre.
“Malaysia is fire-fighting on a daily basis, and it appears to be haphazard. We put bricks and mortar at the centrepiece of our economic development but pay little attention to developing human resources.”
The repatriation of some 400,000 illegal immigrants, mainly low-wage Indonesian workers, during a four-month amnesty that ended in March has left a yawning labour gap in Malaysia’s agricultural, construction, manufacturing and services sectors.
It 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 between five and six percent this year, down from 7.1 per cent in 2004, analysts say.
The government, which is now pursuing some 500,000 illegal immigrants believed to be still in the country, announced last week it would immediately begin recruiting workers from Pakistan, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Vietnam to plug the vacuum.
But industry experts say what Malaysia really needs to do is change its tactics. Such an ad hoc response will not end illegal employment nor meet the country’s long-term need for guest workers, they say.
“Foreign workers are here to stay but we have been flip-flop in our policy. The government must formulate a long-term strategy on manpower and immigration,” said Paul Low, vice-president of the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers.
Low said the government should give incentives for companies to upgrade productivity and modernise, and issue a clear deadline for them to begin gradually reducing their dependence on foreigners.
Foreign workers have long been entrenched in Malaysia’s economy. In the early 20th century, before independence in 1957, British colonialists brought in Chinese migrants to develop tin mining and Indians to work in rubber and palm oil plantations.
Malaysia’s rapid industrialisation since the 1980s led to a new influx of foreign workers. Huge numbers of labourers from Indonesia and Bangladesh helped build the multi-billion-dollar Petronas Twin Towers, one of the world’s tallest buildings, the new administrative capital of Putrajaya and Kuala Lumpur’s international airport.
Malaysia is today one of the largest importers of foreign labour in Asia. Foreign workers, both legal and illegal, number around 2.6 million of its 10.5 million workforce, officials say.
The country has launched several crackdowns on illegal workers since 1992, but each one led to a labour shortage followed by new illegal immigration.
The departure of illegals under the latest amnesty 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.
The government had devised a scheme under which expelled illegal workers would be processed in Indonesia and re-admitted to Malaysia as legal employees, but has complained of delays in the system.—AFP
