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Asia-Pacific Magazine
No. 1 April 1996
pp. 23-27.

Hope And Tragedy For Migrants In Malaysia

by Sidney Jones

Throughout Asia, millions of workers are leaving home to seek their fortune in neighbouring countries, and much of the region's economic development is taking place with the help of migrant labour. The numbers involved are enormous. The International Labour Organisation estimates that some seven million Asians are working abroad, with two million leaving their countries legally each year. The number of illegal departures is probably higher.

An estimated one million Indonesians, legal and illegal, work in Malaysia, the region's largest employer of migrant labour, together with migrants from the Philippines, Bangladesh and Thailand, while Malaysians themselves leave home for Singapore and Japan. Some 300,000 Burmese are believed to be working in Thailand, at the same time that some 50,000 Thais are employed in Japan. South Korea sends workers to Japan and takes them from all over Southeast Asia. Taiwan has 61,000 foreign workers by official count of the Ministry of the Interior, and close to 200,000, according to church sources. The latter figure includes illegal migrants, most of them from the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Singapore and Hong Kong are major importers of foreign workers, while mainland China is becoming an increasingly important sender, with Chinese migrating illegally to all parts of East Asia, Thailand, and the Russian Far East.

Seen from one perspective, migration can be beneficial to all concerned. To the migrant, it can offer an opportunity to earn money at wage levels unthinkable at home. To the government of the sending country, it offers an outlet for the jobless and underemployed and a source of foreign exchange earnings through remittances; to the receiving country, it offers an unending stream of cheap labour that can keep wages low and growth high.

But migration has a dark side as well, particularly for unskilled migrant workers who end up as menial labour in the agricultural, service and construction sectors. They are often the victims of fraud and corruption in the sending country from private recruiters, government agencies, or both. The amount they pay to recruiters to find work abroad becomes a debt payable in the receiving country; that debt in turn often becomes the basis for a kind of bondage where the workers are bound to their employers until the debt is paid off. The terms of repayment are rarely specified but can include exorbitant rates of interest. Migrants who have formal work contracts before they leave their countries are the exception, but even they often fall victim to contract substitution once they arrive in their country of destination. Both legal and illegal migrants can face physical abuse and withholding of wages on the part of their employers, as well as extortion and discrimination from officials in the receiving country. They rarely have the capacity to complain: illegal migrants are always under the threat of deportation if their presence is discovered by officials, and legal migrants face the prospect of losing their jobs and source of income if the complaint fails. Many migrants in any case have no knowledge of their rights or the process for registering a grievance.

Abuses against unskilled migrant workers take place wherever migrants are found. Developed countries treat their migrants no better, and in some cases worse, than developing countries. The abuse of illegal migrants by US security forces on the Mexican border may be as severe as the treatment of illegal Burmese by Thailand's border patrol, and the debt bondage experienced by Mexican workers picking strawberries in California can be of longer duration than that of Indonesian workers in Malaysia. The involvement of immigration officials and others in extortion is as likely to take place in New York as Kuala Lumpur. The perception in receiving countries that migrants are responsible for a wide range of social ills is also a global phenomenon that gives rise to discrimination by both government agencies and private individuals, even when the contribution of migrants to the local or national economy is recognised. Cross-border migrants as a group are so vulnerable, and the business of labour recruitment so lucrative, that abusive practices at every stage of the recruitment and employment process are widespread in every country where migrant labour exists.

The question is what, if anything, can be done to prevent those practices and protect the migrants. Virtually all experts in the field agree that migrants can be better protected if they have full legal status in their country of employment, but that is easier said than done. Malaysia is a particularly interesting case study in this regard, as it has embarked on a series of efforts over the last decade to curb illegal immigration, particularly from Indonesia, through amnesties, crackdowns, government-to-government agreements, bans on unscrupulous recruiting agencies and other measures. All have failed to stem the influx, for reasons ranging from domestic politics to corruption in Indonesia and the determination of the migrants themselves to get to Malaysia come hell or high water.

But while many of those migrants do go on to earn a good living, the result for thousands of others is in fact both hell and high water as I and an Indonesian colleague found in the course of interviews conducted in both Malaysia and Indonesia in 1995 as part of a study of human rights violations against migrant workers. Some 5,000 illegal Indonesian migrants are estimated to have drowned in the Straits of Malacca between 1990 and 1995 while trying to reach Malaysia. That doesn't count the numbers drowned trying to reach Sabah, the state in eastern Malaysia on the northeastern coast of the island of Borneo. The drownings were all avoidable, most of them caused by recruiters who wanted to make just a little more money. On July 20, 1993, for example, 47 men and women migrants drowned off the coast of Morib in the state of Selangor, Malaysia. They were among 117 workers packed into a barge-like boat normally used for hauling logs and other goods among the islands of the Riau archipelago and never meant for use in the open sea. The passengers, mostly from the Indonesian provinces of East Java and North Sumatra, had boarded the boat late at night on a deserted beach near the coastal town of Dumai in Riau. Each had paid about US$300 to a husband-wife team of recruiters in Dumai; the boatman employed by the couple received about US$35 per crossing, and he had two assistants, one of whom was a petty thief.

The weather was stormy, with wind and high waves. About 400 metres from the Morib coast, the boat struck a sandbar. The boatman ordered one of his assistants to jump overboard and test the depth of the water. He did so and found it about chest high. The boatman then forced all the passengers out and told them to walk to shore. It was about 1:30 am. Beyond the sandbar, however, the depth of the water increased, and those who could not swim drowned. Fifty-seven of the migrants made it to shore and were promptly detained by Malaysian immigration authorities; 13 bodies were never recovered. The boatman, his assistants and the recruiters were all later tried and convicted in an Indonesian court but only because the tragedy received so much attention. Similarly overcrowded boats leave deserted beaches in the Riau islands every night, and both recruiters and departure points are well known to local police who often demand protection money. But as long as no one dies, the dangerous game played by these recruiters goes unpunished.

In the Dumai case, the recruiters were not licensed. But many recruiting agencies and brokers officially licensed by the Indonesian Ministry of Manpower are as likely to send migrants to Malaysia illegally as their unlicensed counterparts. Employers in Malaysia, from big electronics firms like Casio to small employment agencies specialising in maids, want Indonesian recruiters to deliver workers as fast as possible, once they place an order, and they pay well. A recruiter can get upwards of US$600 per head from prospective employers, over and above what he or she gets from the migrants themselves, and profits go to the recruiters who can move most quickly. If they go through all the bureaucratic procedures spelled out by the Indonesian and Malaysian governments to get passports and the required two-year visas and work permits for their workers, they can wait six months or longer. Instead, they send the migrants over on the more speedily processed three-month visitor visas, and when the visa expires, the workers are likely to be caught as illegal immigrants, arrested, detained and deported. This, after having mortgaged land or taken out loans from local moneylenders at 100 percent interest or higher to pay the recruiter's fee in the first place.

Sita is one woman we met who thought she was going to Malaysia legally. She worked at a plywood factory in East Kalimantan and was walking by the local office of the Manpower Ministry one day in 1994 when she saw an announcement that jobs were available in a plywood factory in Keningau, Sabah for a salary that was three times what she was then making. She signed up immediately in the ministry office with a representative of a licensed recruiting agency present, and in less than a month had a two-year job contract with the sawmill in Sabah. But she had no work permit and only a three-month visa when her group left by ferry from the Kalimantan port of Nunukan to the Malaysian port of Tawau, and it was not until the ferry entered Malaysian waters that the agency representative told the migrants that their first three months' earnings would be cut completely to pay administrative costs of recruitment, and they would be docked 30 percent of their pay for an unspecified period thereafter to complete the 'repayment'.

This meant that for the duration of the three month they were legally in Malaysia, they would get no pay at all, and by the time they did begin receiving partial wages, they would already be illegal immigrants under Malaysian law. Not only that - when they finally arrived at the sawmill in Keningau after an all-night bus trip from Tawau, they found they were to be housed in a barracks with no running water but with locks on the gates after working hours to try and prevent escape. Some workers managed to escape anyway; others rebelled and eventually persuaded the owner to send them back to Indonesia.

Indonesian migrants in the plantation and construction sectors in Malaysia face particular exploitation because of the system of contract labour, whereby an employer hires a contractor and devolves all responsibility onto him (we found no women contractors) for recruiting and paying workers. The employer is often uninterested in how much of the money he gives to the contractor actually reaches those working under him, and it is the contractor, not the employer, who is legally responsible for the workers under Malaysian law. Most contract workers have no written contracts, receive few if any benefits, and work under conditions that violate international standards. Most are also illegal migrants, and without valid travel documents, they are at the mercy of contractors who can turn them in to the police for arrest and deportation if they do not accept the wages and working conditions offered. Unionisation is obviously not an option for illegal migrants.

Syafei's experience as a contract labourer is a case in point. After finishing high school in Lombok, the island east of Bali, in 1991, Syafei migrated to Tanjung Pinang, Riau (Indonesia) where he got a job on a plantation. There he met a recruiter who went back and forth to Lombok, collecting workers for Malaysian plantations. Migrants from Lombok are particularly prized in peninsular Malaysia, because they have a reputation for hard work and Muslim piety. The recruiter offered to let him join a group of 80 migrants for the equivalent of US$200. Syafei agreed, and the group left for the state of Johor on 25 August 1991. Their boat was met by an ex-policeman who sold Syafei and about a dozen others to a contractor on a fruit plantation for about US$200 per head. After three months without pay, Syafei ran away and found a job for about US$8 a day, doing maintenance work at the Pasir Gudang Golf Club. He stayed here for a month until he encountered a contractor recruiting labour for the construction of a new golf course in Kedah. He worked there until the end of 1993. He was promised about $225 a month, but the contractor deducted about $40 for expenses he allegedly incurred in applying for a work permit for Syafei. After 18 months, the permit had not come through, and Syafei thinks the contractor just pocketed the money. In December 1993, shortly after he quit, he and 20 others were arrested as illegal immigrants, but paid their way out of prison after nine days by pooling nearly $300 to give to the police. After two other jobs, one with an ironmonger and one with another golf course, he was arrested again in August 1995 for having no travel documents or a work permit, and was deported to Indonesia, penniless. His aim when we met him in September was to try again to get to Malaysia illegally, and this time look for a job in construction.

Construction work, however, may be the most hazardous job migrants can enter in Malaysia, as contractors employing illegal migrants rarely require that their workers wear hardhats or safety goggles, and scaffolding often has no netting. (The official death toll from construction site accidents in peninsular Malaysia between January and September 1995 was 26, but the real number was almost certainly far higher, as both employers and contractors who hire illegal workers try to conceal worksite accidents so they won't be charged with violations of Malaysia's labour laws.)

If sawmill, plantation and construction work pose risks for migrants, one would think domestic service would be safer. But women migrants around the world working as maids are especially vulnerable to abuse. The fact that they live in their employers' homes means that they are separated from other workers and have neither witnesses nor protection from others if they face inhumane working conditions or sexual assaults. In Malaysia, nearly 60,000 Indonesian women were legally working as maids in August 1995, almost half the total number of foreign women employed in domestic service. (In January 1996, the Indonesian Manpower Minister said the number of Indonesian maids in Malaysia was 250,000, but the number must include both legal and illegal women.) There seems to be an endless demand for their services. One recruiting agent we met in Pekanbaru, Riau, was sending 500 migrants to Malaysia a month, 400 of them women to work as maids. Many of these women are treated well and paid regularly, but abuse is both common and frustratingly difficult to prosecute.

The three most common complaints from Indonesian women are withholding of wages, unreasonable working conditions, and having to handle pork in preparing meals for Chinese employers. But such phrases give little sense of what these women actually do. One case which was reported in the Indonesian press in late 1995 involved a woman named Eti, a Javanese woman in her mid-thirties. In August 1994, she left her home in Malang, East Java, and registered with a licensed recruitment agency to work in Sarawak as a maid. Two weeks later, after paying about US$250, she was sent by ship to Pontianak in West Kalimantan, together with dozens of other migrants, and was then taken overland into Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, via the border town of Entikong. In Kuching, she went to work in the home of a Malaysian employment agent. She had been promised a salary of about $90 a month and a two-year work contract, but she had neither. She found herself working from 4:30 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. without a break or day off. She was forbidden to leave the house, and when her employers went out, they locked both the doors and the telephone. In October 1995, after more than a year of virtual slavery during which she received no wages at all, her employers forgot to lock the telephone when they left the house, and Eti was able to call for help. The Indonesian consulate finally extracted 10 months' wages in back pay for Eti but at half the promised rate, and no charges were ever brought against the employer, even though they could have been charged with wrongful confinement or forced labour under Malaysian law.

But the women themselves are rarely willing to press charges, even in cases of severe physical abuse. If they are illegal migrants, they would have to reveal themselves as such if they went to the police, and all fear deportation. If they have full legal status, they still rarely have any witnesses to their abuse other than family members of the perpetrator and no idea where to go for help.

Illegal migrants who have been defrauded by recruiters in Indonesia and exploited by employers in Malaysia face yet another set of hazards in the process of arrest and deportation. Malaysian security forces now conduct regular checks of identification and travel documents at places frequented by migrant workers: night markets, shopping centres, bus and ferry terminals and barracks on plantations and construction sites. When the checking is done by local police, most workers can pay their way out. When federal troops from the Police Field Force are involved, the migrants are sent to one of more than a dozen immigration detention centres in east and west Malaysia from which they are then deported, usually within three months. (South Asian migrants, whose deportation is more expensive, often have to wait much longer.) A July 1995 expose by a Malaysian human rights organisation on conditions in these centers caused an international outcry and led to the establishment of a government-appointed inspection body.

The volume of deportees is huge: over 13,000 Indonesians were deported in 1994, and in August 1995 alone, over 500 deportees were sent back to the town of Dumai, overwhelming the capacity of local officials to deal with them. Most of the migrants we interviewed had come back without any money, since they either were not allowed to return home to get their belongings or savings after arrest, or faced extortion in prison, or both. The local government had no funds to feed and house them, let alone send them back to their home villages, which in some cases were at the other end of the Indonesian archipelago, thousands of miles away. Local officials hit on two solutions. One was to farm out the deportees as cheap labour to local employers until they earned enough to both pay for their room and board in Dumai and for tickets either back home or back to Malaysia. The second was to contact agents in Malaysia and see who needed workers. As soon as the job orders or recruiting fees came through, the deportees would be put on a boat to go straight back to Malaysia, as illegally as they had first entered, often within 48 hours of their deportation. Local officials benefited financially from both solutions: they took their cut from local employers in the first and from the Malaysian agents in the second.

For the most part, the deportees, even those who had terrible experiences, wanted to return to Malaysia rather than go home. It is partly that they believed that their abuse or deportation was just a case of bad luck and it would be better the next time; partly because they were determined to go back to get their possessions; and partly because they could not face the loss of face of returning from the land of riches with nothing.

With that kind of determination, reinforced by corrupt Indonesian officials, it may be little wonder that Malaysian efforts to curb illegal immigration have made little headway. But the problem lies on the Malaysian side as well and the contradictory pressures on the government there. The Malaysian economic boom of the last fifteen years would not have been possible without migrant workers, but beginning with the worldwide recession in the mid-1980s that also struck Malaysia, their presence became a major political issue. Malaysian employers, especially in the plantation sector, wanted to ensure a steady stream of cheap labour; Malaysian unions, especially the National Union of Plantation Workers, the largest union in Malaysia, complained that migrant workers were depressing the wage structure and eliminating the incentive of Malaysian employers to hire local workers. The Malaysian public blames immigrants, Indonesians in particular, for a rise in crime, prostitution and other social problems, making it imperative for national politicians to be seen to be protecting the country's borders by detaining and deporting workers who lack proper documents. But in late 1995, when the government tried to clamp down on agencies bringing in maids, middle class Malaysia, dependent on foreign women for child care, protested, fearing a slowdown in the supply.

The delicate racial balance in Malaysia, particularly between ethnic Malays (roughly 60 percent) and Chinese (roughly 30 percent), has also affected the attitude toward migrants. The Malaysian Chinese Association, part of the ruling National Front party, and the opposition (and largely Chinese) Democratic Action Party has been concerned that the influx of Indonesians could substantially augment the Malay side, while officials of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the largest component of the National Front, and the opposition Islamic Party (Parti Islam or PAS) have seen the Indonesians as a potential boost to the Malay side.

The two ministries most responsible for formulating policies toward migrants, Home Affairs and Human Resources, have often found themselves at loggerheads, with Human Resources sensitive to the pleas of employers to keep the migrant flow coming and Home Affairs leading the hardliners in raising alarms about the deleterious effect of migrants on law and order in Malaysia.

In recent years, there have been more concerted efforts by the Malaysian and Indonesian governments to steer Indonesian migrant workers through legal channels. The interest is in part financial from foreign worker levies on the Malaysian side, to recruitment fees and remittances on the Indonesian side, both governments, at the centre, can make more from legal than from illegal workers. (By contrast, local officials, especially in Indonesia, benefit more from their involvement in the clandestine trade.) There are also more public expressions of concern on both sides than ever before about the welfare of migrant workers.

But the abuses against migrant workers are not likely to be addressed seriously unless both governments make a serious effort to clean up corruption in their own ranks. Indonesia needs to examine the link between private recruiters and government officials. Malaysia needs to make as much of an effort to prosecute employers who violate the law as migrants who enter illegally. In late 1995, Malaysia and Indonesia reached an agreement whereby private agents would be effectively eliminated from the migrant trade, and all job orders and recruitment would take place on a government to government basis. A nice idea in theory, but migrants, employers and agents in both countries, when asked for a reaction, dismissed it as a wilful misunderstanding of supply and demand. As long as the recruitment and importation of illegal Indonesian migrant labour to Malaysia remains a hugely profitable enterprise in both countries - and as long as those involved in the trade face minimal sanctions - the practice is not likely to stop.

Further reading:

• Graeme Hugo, 'Indonesian labour migration to Malaysia: trends and policy implications', Southeast Asian Journal of Social Sciences, vo. 21, no.1 (1993);
• James Nayagam, 'Migrant labour absorption in Malaysia', Asia and Pacific Migration Journal, vol 1, nos.3-4 (1992);
• Noleen Heyzer, Geertje Lycklama a Nijeholt and Nedra Weerakoon (eds), The Trade in Domestic Workers: Causes, Mechanisms and Consequences of International Migration, Asia and Pacific Development Centre (Kuala Lumpur,1994);
• Lee Kiong Hock and A. Sivananthiran, Contract Labour in Plantations, Construction and Sawmilling in Malaysia: A Survey Report (Geneva, 1995);
• P.Ramasamy, Plantation Labour, Unions, Capital and the State in Peninsular Malaysia, Oxford in Asia, (Kuala Lumpur, 1994);
• Patrick Pillai, 'People on the move: an overview of recent immigration and emigration in Malaysia', Institute of Strategic and International Studies (Kuala Lumpur, 1992);
• Sidney Jones, Making Money Off Migrants: The Indonesian Exodus to Malaysia, Human Rights Watch NY (forthcoming).

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