A Strategy of Attrition through Enforcement: The Unmaking of Irregular Migration in Malaysia

Abstract

This article reviews Malaysia's attempt to achieve zero migration irregularity by focusing on workplace enforcement, and examines how Malaysia's migration control has become a struggle between the state and employers. Applying the framework of “enforcement through attrition,” this research examines three newly introduced principles governing workplace enforcement: employer sanctions, the Strict Liability Principle, and the Employers’ Mandatory Commitment. The shift to employers in Malaysia's attrition landscape aims to control illegal employment, thereby frustrating the friendly environment to affect migrants’ behaviour. The Malaysian experience suggests that increasing legal consequences for employers hiring undocumented workers runs parallel with making them accountable for the welfare of their foreign workers, thus ensuring better protection of migrant rights. Drawing upon data from semi-structured interviews, government documents, regulations and online news media, this paper empirically analyses the new policy's effects and implications. The findings suggest this deterrence model has a positive effect on the existing documented migrants, demonstrating an increase in both legal employment and in wages for the existing legal migrant workforce.

Of Rice and Men: Rice Consumption-Based Estimates of Undocumented Persons in Malaysia

“…Rice is the staple food of Malaysia, its major immigrant source countries, and other Asian countries included in the estimation (Bandumula 2017). Governments in Malaysia and across the region intervene in rice markets to ensure availability and affordability, which reinforces rice's importance among the low-income households that make up Malaysia's immigrant population (Sharma 2003; Pletcher 1989; Jha, Srinivasan, and Landes 2007; Myung-Hwan 1993; Timmer 1996). Interventions also mitigate the impact of supply shocks, adding weight to assertions about population reflecting demand changes.…”

“…A measure of price variance was included as a model control. In the absence of a single panel dataset for domestic rice prices and in recognition of world price pass-through varying considerably across countries due to government interventions (Sharma 2003), real rice price indexes were constructed for each country from a variety of sources. 7 The price variable entered the model in first differences, as the indexes are not comparable between countries at levels, with price variability better suiting the model construction in any event.…”

“…Estimates from prominent Malaysian scholars follow an almost linearly decreasing pattern over time that is difficult to reconcile with anecdotal reports. 3 A notable exception to the decreasing pattern came in 2014, when the then Minister for Human Resources provided a 4.6 million figure for undocumented workers (against 2.1 million documented foreign workers), although there was little methodological transparency surrounding how this figure was generated (Low 2017). Available data on official foreign workers and undocumented persons in Malaysia are presented in Figure 1, although it must be stressed that the undocumented data points are not comparable across time but reflect different methodologies and, in some cases, multi-year averaging.…”

“…Since at least the 1970s, most Asian countries, including Malaysia, have adopted policies to minimize price and supply fluctuation, including price ceilings, centralized importing, stockpiling, and distribution of rice. These policies have had significant budgetary costs but have broadly succeeded in their purpose, with periodic global price and supply shocks having limited transmission into domestic markets (Sharma 2003; Pletcher 1989; Jha, Srinivasan, and Landes 2007; Myung-Hwan 1993; Timmer 1996). Such distortions are equally beneficial to the statistical analysis in this article.…”

Managing labour migration in Malaysia: foreign workers and the challenges of ‘control’ beyond liberal democracies

“…Yet Malaysia continues to have a large number of both documented and undocumented foreign workers. Alongside the estimated 1.8-3 million documented foreign workers in Malaysia (Loh et al 2019), anywhere from 1.46 million (Loh et al 2019) to 4.6 million (Low 2017) are estimated to be 'illegal ' . This paper contends that the answer to this apparent contradiction lies in looking beyond the nature of the Malaysian regime to a more detailed examination of both the content of specific policies and the change in policies over time. Given the opacity of the Malaysian regime, it is impossible to know the motivations for all these sudden changes -which have been dubbed 'engimatic' (Nah 2011, 4) and 'ad-hoc' (Loh et al 2019).…”