Connecting the Dots on Migration
Yesterday the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched its annual Human Development Report. The theme for this year is Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development.
I went along to the launch because the HDRs are often very valuable sources of information about human development all over the world. Indeed in the back of the report is a treasure trove of information about almost anything you need to know about any country. For instance, Malaysia is 66th among the High Human Development Index countries, lower than, say, Argentina or the Seychelles or Bulgaria but higher than Brazil, the Russian Federation and Turkey. Our HDI has remained the same from 2006 to 2007 which is the period covered by the report. (Local newspapers only mentioned that we came in third among ASEAN countries in the HDI list; for the record, Singapore is 23rd and Brunei 30th, very far ahead of us.)
The entire report gives a very interesting overview, backed by many empirical studies, on the issue of human mobility, legal, illegal, voluntary or forced. It looks at the factors that lead to migration and the impacts in economic and social terms of these migrations to both the countries of origin and the destination countries. One of the most interesting facts found in the report is that, as large as international migration is, most people migrate within their own countries (some 740 million out of 1 billion movers).
At the launch the United Nations Resident Representative Kamal Malhotra gave a very frank speech about the issues surrounding migration in Malaysia. He stated that Malaysia has some 2.1 legal migrants in the country along with a significant number of illegals and refugees. This amounts to about 11% of our population, up from about 0.1% in 1960, a substantial proportion indeed. Nevertheless these migrants have contributed to Malaysia's development in very tangible ways. Most of our roads and buildings would not have been built without them, our plantations would not thrive, nor our children cared for without migrant workers.
However despite being one of the countries very dependent on migrant workers, the Malaysian public is not very appreciative of this. In a survey on attitudes towards immigration of 52 destination countries , Malaysia came in as the country which was LEAST welcoming to migrant workers (see graph). More welcoming than we are countries like Switzerland, China, Australia and South Africa. Our inhospitability is demonstrated in the many barriers to migrant workers coming here to work including high costs (compounded by corruption), our lack of basic essential services and protection for legal workers, their vulnerability to arrest, punishment and deportation and our refusal to recognise the position of refugees by not signing the United Nations Convention on Refugees.
I was amazed when Tan Sri Nor Mohamad Yakcop, Minister in the Prime Minister's Department, in his launching speech, avoided the entire question of international immigration into Malaysia and focussed almost totally on internal rural to urban migration. This meant that he did not address any of the issues that Kamal Malhotra had just mentioned in his speech a few minutes before. Not even to at least deny that we're such unwelcoming people. (For the record, 65% of Malaysia's population is now urban due to migration from rural areas over the past 50 years. Which rather begs the question of why politicians still behave as if we are still one big rural nation, with rural issues, concerns and attitudes.)
In the papers today all the very brief reports on the launch avoided the issue of our inhospitality to migrant workers and refugees. Bernama reported that Malaysia 'allows' both unskilled and semi-skilled workers "unlike many countries that favour only skilled migrants and put up barriers against unskilled workers."
But the reporter obviously never read the report itself because it also says that typically such unskilled and semi-skilled migrant workers fill in jobs that locals do not want. What's more, bringing in skilled workers results in broader economic benefits, including higher rates of innovation. For example, data from the US show that between 1950 and 2000, skilled migrants boosted innovation: a 1.3% increase in the share of migrant university graduates increased the number of patents issued per capita by a massive 15%, with marked contributions from science and engineering graduates and without any adverse effects on the innovative activity of local people.
This is why countries like Singapore and Hong Kong have explicit policies to attract foreign highly-skilled professionals.
The report discusses the real and perceived impacts of immigration because "these perceptions shape the political climate in which policy reforms are debated and determined." For example, despite what many think, the impact of immigration has very small or no impact on local employment. So if we fear that the existence of foreign workers in our country deprives locals of a job, this would really only impact those locals who are working in very low-income labour-intensive jobs. Obviously in our country, this is not a very large segment of our local labour force since very few of our people work in construction, agriculture or the domestic sector. This was certainly proven when the last time the Government decided to deport migrant workers en masse, the plantation and agriculture industries virtually came to a standstill.
What's more "even locals with low levels of formal schooling may still have advantages over migrants due not only to language but also to knowledge of local institutions, networks and technology, which enables them to specialise in complementary and better-paid tasks." The exception I would think would be those employers who prefer to employ foreign workers to keep costs down by paying them a pittance rather than paying locals who may be able to provide better service, for example in restaurants or shops. Having said that, I hear lots of complaints from employers regarding local workers' attitudes towards these jobs, often being undisciplined and less than diligent in performing their tasks.
One of the main reasons for hostility towards foreign workers is the perception that foreign workers are responsible for most crimes. This has been shaped mostly by the media which often depicts crimes and violence as being committed far more by foreigners than by locals despite studies by our own police force that show that crimes committed by foreigners amount to only 4% of the total. Of course, politicians often also help to stoke these concerns about security. History is full of instances, often violent, of anti-immigrant sentiment ranging from those towards the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia who were suspected of political subversion on behalf of Communist China during the 1960s, and the ethnic Russian populations in the Baltic states who were suspected of undermining the states' newly won independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Only today there is a letter in The Star urging the Government to take seriously the threat of the Bendera group to invade Malaysia by calling on their one million plus countrymen to "rise up and kill one particular race" here and in so doing cause chaos in our country. This, despite a featured interview with the head of Bendera a few days ago in the same paper which patently showed what a nutcase he is.
It made me wonder whether the letter-writer was urging for us to do what Americans did after the bombing of Pearl Harbour when they incarcerated some 142,000 Japanese-Americans in ten concentration camps, one of the worst examples of jingoism in history. Although if we tried to incarcerate all the Indonesian workers in the country because we think Bendera's threat is actually viable, our country would probably come to a standstill and many careerwomen would be forced to stay home to cook and clean. For no pay, I might add.
If our attitudes towards legal migrants are hardly what those ads on Malaysia Truly Asia portray, even worse is the way we treat refugees. We have some 90,000 refugees in Malaysia, out of which 90% are from Burma. Others are from Sri Lanka, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Out of these, 65,000 are registered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) which gives a small measure of protection.
It's important to remember that refugees are different from migrants. Migrants move to seek opportunities while refugees move by force, often because of conflict or other very dangerous situations at home. The former can go home but refugees cannot. Most refugees would like to go on to third countries.
The problem with us not signing the UN Convention is that there is no legal or administrative framework for us to deal with refugees. They are dealt with under the Immigration Act which doesn't mention refugees and basically deals with them in a very narrow way: are they here legally or not? In fact, the entire refugee problem is mostly dealt with by the Home Ministry which, as with most things under their purview, sees it entirely as a threat to national security.
Unsurprisingly, refugees living here have the most miserable of lives. They cannot work and hence have few means of supporting themselves and their families. Their children ( there are 16,000 refugee children in Malaysia, more than half of whom are of school-age) cannot attend school. Healthcare is a major issue; refugees suffer all sorts of diseases and illnesses but cannot seek treatment even though generally our hospitals will not turn them away.
But generally they don't go to hospitals, firstly because of lack of money and secondly, because of the ever-present danger of running into RELA. Here's a video report on what refugees have to deal with in Malaysia.
There is also a photography exhibition on Burmese refugees at the Annexe, Central Market from October 15-25 which gives a good picture of their situation here. For details, please go here.
When we complain about the way other countries view us, we often don't make the connection between what we do to their nationals and how they respond. It is perfectly natural for any country to get upset if there are constant reports of their nationals being abused overseas. When we ourselves try to downplay the abuse by saying that it doesn't happen often, nobody really believes us. Our papers and TV routinely show migrant workers and refugees with very little sympathy or understanding for the circumstances they find themselves in.
As one of the panellists at the Human Development Report launch pointed out, our media are quick to report crimes committed by foreigners but rarely ever highlight the crimes commited against foreigners (unless they're white or tourists). If we detailed all the abuse against migrant workers and foreigners ranging from refusal to pay salaries to making them work all hours to outright thievery to rape and possibly even murder, we really don't come out well at all.
Yet we have politicians who do very little about these abuses because they think blaming foreigners for everything is what we want to hear. Add to that a complicit media who choose to report on how supposedly generous we are ( including the abhorrently patronising "they should be thankful we're giving them jobs at all!" stance), rather than the truth, then we will perpetually remain at the bottom of the friendliness to foreigners scale.
I went along to the launch because the HDRs are often very valuable sources of information about human development all over the world. Indeed in the back of the report is a treasure trove of information about almost anything you need to know about any country. For instance, Malaysia is 66th among the High Human Development Index countries, lower than, say, Argentina or the Seychelles or Bulgaria but higher than Brazil, the Russian Federation and Turkey. Our HDI has remained the same from 2006 to 2007 which is the period covered by the report. (Local newspapers only mentioned that we came in third among ASEAN countries in the HDI list; for the record, Singapore is 23rd and Brunei 30th, very far ahead of us.)
The entire report gives a very interesting overview, backed by many empirical studies, on the issue of human mobility, legal, illegal, voluntary or forced. It looks at the factors that lead to migration and the impacts in economic and social terms of these migrations to both the countries of origin and the destination countries. One of the most interesting facts found in the report is that, as large as international migration is, most people migrate within their own countries (some 740 million out of 1 billion movers).
At the launch the United Nations Resident Representative Kamal Malhotra gave a very frank speech about the issues surrounding migration in Malaysia. He stated that Malaysia has some 2.1 legal migrants in the country along with a significant number of illegals and refugees. This amounts to about 11% of our population, up from about 0.1% in 1960, a substantial proportion indeed. Nevertheless these migrants have contributed to Malaysia's development in very tangible ways. Most of our roads and buildings would not have been built without them, our plantations would not thrive, nor our children cared for without migrant workers.
However despite being one of the countries very dependent on migrant workers, the Malaysian public is not very appreciative of this. In a survey on attitudes towards immigration of 52 destination countries , Malaysia came in as the country which was LEAST welcoming to migrant workers (see graph). More welcoming than we are countries like Switzerland, China, Australia and South Africa. Our inhospitability is demonstrated in the many barriers to migrant workers coming here to work including high costs (compounded by corruption), our lack of basic essential services and protection for legal workers, their vulnerability to arrest, punishment and deportation and our refusal to recognise the position of refugees by not signing the United Nations Convention on Refugees.
I was amazed when Tan Sri Nor Mohamad Yakcop, Minister in the Prime Minister's Department, in his launching speech, avoided the entire question of international immigration into Malaysia and focussed almost totally on internal rural to urban migration. This meant that he did not address any of the issues that Kamal Malhotra had just mentioned in his speech a few minutes before. Not even to at least deny that we're such unwelcoming people. (For the record, 65% of Malaysia's population is now urban due to migration from rural areas over the past 50 years. Which rather begs the question of why politicians still behave as if we are still one big rural nation, with rural issues, concerns and attitudes.)
In the papers today all the very brief reports on the launch avoided the issue of our inhospitality to migrant workers and refugees. Bernama reported that Malaysia 'allows' both unskilled and semi-skilled workers "unlike many countries that favour only skilled migrants and put up barriers against unskilled workers."
But the reporter obviously never read the report itself because it also says that typically such unskilled and semi-skilled migrant workers fill in jobs that locals do not want. What's more, bringing in skilled workers results in broader economic benefits, including higher rates of innovation. For example, data from the US show that between 1950 and 2000, skilled migrants boosted innovation: a 1.3% increase in the share of migrant university graduates increased the number of patents issued per capita by a massive 15%, with marked contributions from science and engineering graduates and without any adverse effects on the innovative activity of local people.
This is why countries like Singapore and Hong Kong have explicit policies to attract foreign highly-skilled professionals.
The report discusses the real and perceived impacts of immigration because "these perceptions shape the political climate in which policy reforms are debated and determined." For example, despite what many think, the impact of immigration has very small or no impact on local employment. So if we fear that the existence of foreign workers in our country deprives locals of a job, this would really only impact those locals who are working in very low-income labour-intensive jobs. Obviously in our country, this is not a very large segment of our local labour force since very few of our people work in construction, agriculture or the domestic sector. This was certainly proven when the last time the Government decided to deport migrant workers en masse, the plantation and agriculture industries virtually came to a standstill.
What's more "even locals with low levels of formal schooling may still have advantages over migrants due not only to language but also to knowledge of local institutions, networks and technology, which enables them to specialise in complementary and better-paid tasks." The exception I would think would be those employers who prefer to employ foreign workers to keep costs down by paying them a pittance rather than paying locals who may be able to provide better service, for example in restaurants or shops. Having said that, I hear lots of complaints from employers regarding local workers' attitudes towards these jobs, often being undisciplined and less than diligent in performing their tasks.
One of the main reasons for hostility towards foreign workers is the perception that foreign workers are responsible for most crimes. This has been shaped mostly by the media which often depicts crimes and violence as being committed far more by foreigners than by locals despite studies by our own police force that show that crimes committed by foreigners amount to only 4% of the total. Of course, politicians often also help to stoke these concerns about security. History is full of instances, often violent, of anti-immigrant sentiment ranging from those towards the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia who were suspected of political subversion on behalf of Communist China during the 1960s, and the ethnic Russian populations in the Baltic states who were suspected of undermining the states' newly won independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Only today there is a letter in The Star urging the Government to take seriously the threat of the Bendera group to invade Malaysia by calling on their one million plus countrymen to "rise up and kill one particular race" here and in so doing cause chaos in our country. This, despite a featured interview with the head of Bendera a few days ago in the same paper which patently showed what a nutcase he is.
It made me wonder whether the letter-writer was urging for us to do what Americans did after the bombing of Pearl Harbour when they incarcerated some 142,000 Japanese-Americans in ten concentration camps, one of the worst examples of jingoism in history. Although if we tried to incarcerate all the Indonesian workers in the country because we think Bendera's threat is actually viable, our country would probably come to a standstill and many careerwomen would be forced to stay home to cook and clean. For no pay, I might add.
If our attitudes towards legal migrants are hardly what those ads on Malaysia Truly Asia portray, even worse is the way we treat refugees. We have some 90,000 refugees in Malaysia, out of which 90% are from Burma. Others are from Sri Lanka, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Out of these, 65,000 are registered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) which gives a small measure of protection.
It's important to remember that refugees are different from migrants. Migrants move to seek opportunities while refugees move by force, often because of conflict or other very dangerous situations at home. The former can go home but refugees cannot. Most refugees would like to go on to third countries.
The problem with us not signing the UN Convention is that there is no legal or administrative framework for us to deal with refugees. They are dealt with under the Immigration Act which doesn't mention refugees and basically deals with them in a very narrow way: are they here legally or not? In fact, the entire refugee problem is mostly dealt with by the Home Ministry which, as with most things under their purview, sees it entirely as a threat to national security.
Unsurprisingly, refugees living here have the most miserable of lives. They cannot work and hence have few means of supporting themselves and their families. Their children ( there are 16,000 refugee children in Malaysia, more than half of whom are of school-age) cannot attend school. Healthcare is a major issue; refugees suffer all sorts of diseases and illnesses but cannot seek treatment even though generally our hospitals will not turn them away.
But generally they don't go to hospitals, firstly because of lack of money and secondly, because of the ever-present danger of running into RELA. Here's a video report on what refugees have to deal with in Malaysia.
There is also a photography exhibition on Burmese refugees at the Annexe, Central Market from October 15-25 which gives a good picture of their situation here. For details, please go here.
When we complain about the way other countries view us, we often don't make the connection between what we do to their nationals and how they respond. It is perfectly natural for any country to get upset if there are constant reports of their nationals being abused overseas. When we ourselves try to downplay the abuse by saying that it doesn't happen often, nobody really believes us. Our papers and TV routinely show migrant workers and refugees with very little sympathy or understanding for the circumstances they find themselves in.
As one of the panellists at the Human Development Report launch pointed out, our media are quick to report crimes committed by foreigners but rarely ever highlight the crimes commited against foreigners (unless they're white or tourists). If we detailed all the abuse against migrant workers and foreigners ranging from refusal to pay salaries to making them work all hours to outright thievery to rape and possibly even murder, we really don't come out well at all.
Yet we have politicians who do very little about these abuses because they think blaming foreigners for everything is what we want to hear. Add to that a complicit media who choose to report on how supposedly generous we are ( including the abhorrently patronising "they should be thankful we're giving them jobs at all!" stance), rather than the truth, then we will perpetually remain at the bottom of the friendliness to foreigners scale.
And we want to sell 1Malaysia to the world?
Posted by MarinaM
No comments:
Post a Comment