Print

Mail

wiki links

Malaysia plans to restrict movements of foreign workers

Malaysian officials -- who have accused foreign workers of boosting the crime rate, seducing local women and eating pet cats and dogs -- are calling for them to be ghettoized and tracked, a news report said yesterday.

Deputy Internal Security Minister Fu Ah Kiow said the need to house foreign workers away from local communities and regulate their movements was necessary "to improve public security," the New Straits Times quoted him as saying.

"We need to have a more regulated policy where we can place the foreign workers in designated areas without depriving them of their basic rights," Fu said, according to the paper. He cited one example of a community who were "uncomfortable" with a large foreign worker presence over security fears.

Rights groups are outraged at Malaysia's plans to restrict foreign workers to their quarters. The workers may only be allowed to leave once they receive permission and their particulars recorded, news reports said.

A bill to restrict the workers may be tabled next month, Home Minister Radzi Sheikh Ahmad said last week.

There are about 1.8 million foreigners working legally in Malaysia, while another 700,000 do not have proper papers, according to government figures.

Malaysia has long attracted migrants, many fleeing poverty, from Southeast and South Asian countries like Indonesia, Myanmar, India, Bangladesh and China. Many of them end up doing menial work spurned by locals on plantations and in the construction industry, and are widely blamed for crime and social problems.

London-based Amnesty International said last week that since only 2 percent of crimes committed in Malaysia last year were by foreign workers, "this proposal to link the escalation of crime with foreign workers seems to amount to racial profiling."

Fu and his officials were not immediately available for comment.

Last week Shahrir Abdul Samad, a member of Parliament in southern Johor state, urged Malaysian labor agents to educate migrant workers not to cook cats and dogs amid suspicions local migrants were eating kidnapped pets.

Malaysia restricted the number of Bangladeshi workers in the country in 1996 and banned them entirely in 2004, after it said they were creating social problems by entering into romantic liaisons with local women.

Officials have said the Bangladeshis, who looked like Indian movie stars to some local women, had seduced and eloped with them.

The ban was eased last year.
This story has been viewed 1959 times.