Malaysia's government said Thursday it would defer a amnesty program for illegal foreign workers due to start next week to tighten measures to curb any abuse.
The amnesty originally slated to start July 11 will be Malaysia's biggest effort to manage its growing population of foreign workers.
The first step will be gathering the fingerprints of some 2 million legal foreign workers in the country to create a biometrics database, Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said.
He said this would enable authorities to better monitor the amnesty and ensure companies appointed to facilitate the registration process would not persuade legal foreign workers to sign themselves off as illegal for a quick buck. The companies will be paid by the government to register the illegal labor.
"We have received information that there may be cases of those who are presently legal but who want to migrate from being legal to being illegal because of some unscrupulous parties who want to make money out of this," he was quoted as saying by Bernama news agency.
An aide to Muhyiddin confirmed his comments.
Authorities estimate at least 2 million foreigners work in Malaysia illegally, mostly from neighboring Indonesia. No new date has been set for the amnesty.
This relatively wealthy Southeast Asian nation attracts people from impoverished or war-torn places either looking for work locally or trying to enter other nations, such as Australia.
It is dependent on foreign labor for tens of thousands of low-paying menial jobs at palm oil plantations, factories, construction sites and restaurants.
No comments:
Post a Comment