As Malaysia deports illegal workers, employers run short

KUALA LUMPUR — Suis Anas, an Indonesian who sneaked into Malaysia for work, slumped in the corner of a detention camp after being arrested, jailed and caned. His eyes were fixed on the ferry that would take him home.

"I wanted to change my life," said Anas, who is 35 and one of 200 illegal migrants who were waiting to be deported from the state of Johor. "I had only worked for a week before I was arrested."

A Malaysian campaign to expel about 600,000 illegal workers may be starting to backfire. While politicians blame the migrants for soaring crime rates, demand for workers is growing, as the government invests $57 billion in agriculture, construction and manufacturing to sustain economic growth through 2010.

Some plantation owners and builders already are experiencing labor shortages, said Ismail Abd Rahim, director general of the Human Resources Ministry. About 1.9 million overseas migrants, mostly from Indonesia, account for 17 percent of the work force, according to the Ministry of Finance.

"The number is overflowing in certain sectors, but we can't just cut the number" of migrants, Ismail said.

Service industries like hotels and restaurants may be hit next, said Suhaimi Ilyas, chief economist at Aseambankers Malaysia, an investment bank based in Kuala Lumpur.

"A shortage of foreign workers will hurt the economy," he said. "The country has become increasingly dependent on them."

For every 1 percent increase in the number of legal overseas workers from 1998 to 2002, the country's economy expanded by 0.2 percent, according to the latest figures from the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers.

Malaysia has asked for 20,000 workers from East Nusa Tenggara Province in Indonesia, the Malaysian state-run news agency Bernama reported this week, quoting I Nasu Conterius, who is in charge of labor and transmigration in the province.

Illegal workers must go, said Ishak Mohamed, head of the state immigration department's enforcement division. They cost the government money in the form of "unpaid levies that should have been paid, the diseases that they brought to this country and the social problems, such as crimes," he said.

Foreigners accounted for 3.8 percent of the almost 200,000 crimes reported last year, up from 3 percent in 2005, according to the Malaysian federal criminal investigation department.

Still, the country cannot avoid importing labor, because Malaysians balk at low-skilled work, Ishak said.

"Malaysian people don't want to work in these fields because of the D factor: dangerous, dirty, dusty and difficult," he said.

Top Glove, the world's biggest maker of latex gloves, needs to hire at least 800 workers a year as it expands, said Lim Cheong Guan, one of the company's executive directors. The company, based in the state of Selangor, employs 3,500 migrants - about half its work force - at 12 factories across the country because locals do not want the jobs, Lim said.

Malaysia has tried to crack down on illegal workers before, each time creating labor shortages, said Shamsuddin Bardan, executive director of the Malaysian Employers Federation.

The campaigns do not work because Malaysia has a shortage of about 400,000 low-skilled workers each year, giving migrants and employers an incentive to break the law, Shamsuddin said.

Waiwulatin Sartam, a 29-year-old carpenter from East Java in Indonesia, is lying low. While his employer canceled his visa a year ago after a wage dispute, Sartam is working 12 hours a day painting houses near Kuala Lumpur.

"I'm better off on my own, working for whoever I want, as long as I don't get caught," he said. "A lot of people pay me decently for jobs I'm good at."

Being legal may have few advantages. Malaysian labor practices "promote involuntary servitude conditions," the U.S. State Department said in a report June 12. Some employers confiscate workers' passports, confine them to the workplace and withhold payments until contracts are complete, the report said.

"Confiscation of passports, though technically in violation of the Passports Act, is the government's prescribed method of controlling contract laborers," the report said.

There were no prosecutions of employers who refused to pay employees and hold their wages in "escrow"' in 2006, according to the report.

Ravichandran Natarajan, a 26-year-old from Tamil Nadu State in India, said that his employer, a furniture maker in Kuala Lumpur, had canceled his work permit after a dispute over unpaid wages.

He was deported before the Labor Court could hear his complaint, said Florida Sandanasamy, a program officer at Tenaganita, a labor rights group based in Kuala Lumpur.

"The moment the worker files a complaint to the Labor Department, the employer can easily go to immigration to terminate their contract," Sandanasamy said.

The government has broadened labor recruitment to 17 countries from 2 to try to avoid shortages, said Ismail of the Human Resources Ministry. Even so, Malaysian employers prefer Indonesians because they speak a similar language, he said.