The lives of foreign workers have become intertwined with ours as our country has grown and prospered through the years, but unfortunately, many find themselves at the losing end of a system that doesn’t allow them proper redress once they slip through the cracks.

There are approximately 2.27 million legal migrants in Malaysia, but the number of those living and working here illegally has been estimated to be at least two million – if not higher, according to NGOs that work with undocumented migrants.

The frustrating part is that many of the foreign workers who are now undocumented started off as legal workers.

“I came here as a student first and attended a local college,” said Naeem, who came to Malaysia from Bangladesh five years ago.

“It was not a good college – there was no real education, only fake certificates. There were a lot of syndicates with Bangladeshis and Malaysians, and fake students from many countries. I really wanted to further my education, but I was cheated. Luckily, I was able to get another job and a permit.

“Most of my friends were brought in indirectly as workers. But we have no flexibility for jobs. We are trapped with the same pay and long hours, which are more than promised – for example, our contract says eight hours a day, but once you start work, it’s usually 12 hours a day. Sometimes one day off a week, sometimes no days off,” he said.

Naeem said every foreign worker in Malaysia wants to be a legal worker, with fair wages, fair terms in their contract and the ability to go back home and visit their families. However, this is usually not possible, he conceded.

He said he fell foul of the system when he was cheated by an agent.

“Two years ago, I sent my passport for visa renewal. But I didn’t know what the agent was doing. This agent just takes the money and keeps our passport in the drawer. Suddenly, I am illegal,” he said.

Now, Naeem feels stuck.

“I think my embassy is not really taking care. There are thousands of cases and I don’t know who they can help. So, if I want to go back to Bangladesh, I need to surrender to the Immigration Department, pay a fine and then I can go back,” he said.

In the meantime, he is taking his chances in going about his work here, but there is another risk that comes with that particular scenario.

“When the police see me, they know I am a foreigner. If I don’t have the right papers, they take away my phone and usually I must pay them as well.”

Naeem said things are getting so bad he thinks there should be campaigns in countries like Bangaladesh warning people against taking up the attractive-sounding offers in Malaysia.

“In my country, some people know that things can be bad here, but a lot of people don’t have jobs and they think it is fast money. They don’t realise once they come here – they are trapped into working to pay off the cost of coming – which by now is RM15,000.

“If your salary is RM1,200 – how long will that take you? I know some people staying here, working hard for 10 years, just kerja, makan, tidur (work, eat and sleep) but still, they have very little money at the end of it.”

At the end of June, Human Resources Minister M Saravanan announced that the government would freeze the recruitment of migrant workers until the end of the year as locals would be given priority to fill up job vacancies, given the sudden increase in the number of unemployed Malaysians due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

Naeem thinks there is nothing wrong with the government protecting jobs for its citizens, but he fears that it will only result in even more undocumented migrants.

“After what happened with Covid-19, it’s good for the government to help their own people. But do it properly,” he pleaded.

“Offer amnesty, send us back legally. In the whole country, there are so many illegals. I think if they really want to, the government can clean this up within one or two months, but they don’t. Finally, it’s the innocent migrant workers who are being bullied,” Naeem said.

Systematic issues

Nobody willingly trades a comfortable life in their homeland for uncertainty, harassment, and possible abuse in a far-off land. And despite the high number of undocumented migrants on our shores, many did not begin life in Malaysia that way.

Adrian Pereira of the North-South Initiative said that one of the key problems is unscrupulous agents who deceive workers and manipulate them for profit.

“Some agents have a history of giving false advice and promises over the process of getting permits and jobs in Malaysia,” Pereira told Malaysiakini.

"Some migrants have low literacy levels and this makes them susceptible to fraud and deception, and even literate migrant workers become possible victims of fraud and unjust treatment by both recruiters and employers,” he added.

Pereira explained that recruiters promise work permits and good employment contracts with decent wages and conditions. Upon arrival, however, the workers often find that not only have their contracts, employment sites and terms and conditions been changed, but that they may have also violated Malaysian immigration laws.

Worse still, the workers would be facing recruitment debt as they borrowed huge sums from syndicates and moneylenders to finance their initial migration costs, Pereira said, adding that for most workers, there is little access to justice in proving the fraud or deception.

Another stage that leaves much room for abuse is that of re-hiring and visa renewals, he said. This involves workers who were here legitimately but needed to extend their stay.

“The migrant working visa renewal process is riddled with cheating, a lack of transparency, and little accountability by agents and employers. Most migrants have little idea of how this opaque process works and passports are often illegally held by employers and whether their visas are renewed or not is out of the worker’s control.

“Similarly an employer’s rehiring process is lengthy and non-transparent, and the subcontractors and sub-agents of rehiring face little accountability. It is a privatised process driven by profiteering motifs, fraud and deception,” Pereira claimed.

He added that workers were often not given receipts of rehiring payments and many agents cheat workers, taking their money but not providing e-cards. Additionally, he said, there is no adequate redress mechanism that can investigate and track these agents.

Tenaganita executive director Glorene Das, concurred that this was a common problem.

“It is the responsibility of the employers to renew the work permits of their migrant workers each year - the workers have no control over the renewal of their work permits. However, many employers fail to do so and as a result, the worker becomes undocumented.”In fact, many migrants the Malaysian government has labelled ’Illegal’ (or in more humane terms ’undocumented’) attain that status due to no fault of their own," Glorene said.

Nor is this problem a new one. Vietnamese worker VT Nguyen faced this more than a decade ago.

“I worked two years in Malaysia about 15 years ago,” said Nguyen. “In a furniture factory in Serdang. It was the worst two years of my life.

“I came to Malaysia legally on a work permit but the agent took away my passport. I had no off-days and worked long hours in a confined space every day, without rest. There was no fan and not enough water also.

“Finally, I just ran away from the job and made my way back through Thailand. I had to smuggle myself back home,” Nguyen said.

He recalled that life working in Malaysia was exceedingly difficult, with no one to help the foreign workers. Thankfully, the Vietnam economy has improved a lot since then, he said, so his countrymen don’t have to go overseas to work in such dire conditions.

Nguyen now enjoys a comfortable life running a backpacker’s hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, a decade after his ordeal in Malaysia.

Siti is an Indonesian who first came to work as a maid. But she was struggling to get along with her employer, whom she said was demanding and unreasonable. “I wanted to work in a restaurant, like my friends, instead of under one person who made my life hell... but no one could help me.”

Finally, she went back to Indonesia and then came to Malaysia again, this time taking an illegal route – a boat trip across the Straits of Malacca in the middle of the night.

“Life in Malaysia can be better than in Indonesia, where there is no work to feed my family, but this is the risk I have to take,” Siti said, adding that harassment from the authorities is the norm and that her migrant community has worked out a system of hiding from raids.

Like Naeem, Siti told Malaysiakini that the situation has become even worse since the arrest of Md Rayhan Kabir, a young Bangladeshi who spoke up about the conditions faced by migrant workers in a documentary aired by Al Jazeera’s 101 East, titled “Locked up in Malaysia’s Lockdown.”

“No one dares to speak up ever since Rayhan got arrested,” she said.

Trafficking and employer bondage

Malaysia’s history as a human trafficking hub is well documented by civil society and even reflected in government data, Pereira said. Despite the horror of the Wang Kelian trafficking camps in Perlis, which were revealed in 2015 to have more than 100 bodies buried in mass graves, there has been very little enforcement to reverse the trend.

“Documented corruption and inefficiency within border enforcement agencies add to the problems faced by migrant workers. We believe there are large and politically well-connected trafficking syndicates still in operation,” he said, adding that the system has not provided enough assistance to the victims.

“We must never punish migrants who became victims of trafficking to Malaysia, as their circumstances are beyond their control.

“Criminalising victims and survivors is not the way to go; we should instead be going after the syndicates and those responsible,” Pereira said.

He also questioned the hiring policy, which requires employer consent for foreign workers to change employers.

“This inflexibility is particularly problematic in cases of exploitation, intimidation, and physical violence, where these workers have no choice but to abscond and become undocumented.

“This is exacerbated where workers’ passports have been illegally retained. This system, which resembles the widely-criticised kafala system practised in the Gulf countries, provides little option to seek redress.

Glorene agreed that worker abuse is a very common problem that occurs, resulting in many of them fleeing their workplace and therefore, breaking their employment contract.

“Many migrant workers also suffer physical and verbal abuses and violation of their labour rights at the workplace.

“However, they are unable to change employers because the migrant worker is bound to the employer named in the work permit. Hence, the worker has little choice but to abscond and as a result, becomes undocumented. The problem is compounded when the passports of these workers are retained by the employer.

Glorene added that thousands of workers are recruited and brought into Malaysia by recruiting agencies that act as bogus employers and actually have no jobs to offer but instead farm out the workers to other employers.

“These workers are technically undocumented because they are not working for the employer named on the work permit.

’Rehiring debacle’

Glorene also brought up the issue of the rehiring programme that was implemented from Feb 16, 2016, until June 30, 2018, as a well-intentioned programme that failed in achieving its goals.

“It was publicised as an avenue for undocumented workers in the country to obtain a valid work permit and until the end of May 2018, approximately 745,000 undocumented workers had registered under the rehiring programme.

“Unfortunately, thousands of workers who had registered have still not completed the rehiring process because of weaknesses in the system, fraud by government-appointed agents, corruption or delays in the Immigration Department.

“Consequently the workers lost thousands of ringgit and their passports, which had been given to agents and they still remain in limbo.

Glorene said that up to 700,000 workers paid an amount of RM6,000 each to be re-legalised but claimed that only 110,000 workers were given the permit.

“The rest of them are still lingering, and are among the ones being arrested,” she added.

No quick fix

The issue of a growing population of undocumented persons in Malaysia has received more attention after the Covid-19 outbreak, the accompanying movement control order, raids on migrants and the focus on conditions in immigration depots. But we are not closer to a holistic solution, Glorene said.

“We believe that it is a great concern to the public that there are individuals who are abusing our laws and system to profit over others and some who abuse their authority and power, all of which created this issue in the first place.”As such, a critical question we need to ask is: ’what is wrong with the system?’ We can continue to crack down and execute raids regularly to locate and deport these individuals, but without enforcing the laws against these perpetrators who exploit the system and fuel the growing population of the undocumented, we can expect the issue to persist, time and time again," Glorene added.

NOTE: The real names of the migrant interviewees have not been used in this report.

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Malaysiakini

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