I’m perplexed by the recent news that the director-general of the Malaysian Immigration Department has the final say on whether or not a Malaysian can leave the country.

Firstly, I’m wondering how he has not yet resigned while 15 of his staffers have been fired after it was exposed that the immigration system had been hacked. Not to mention the multiple Malaysians who somehow managed to bypass the immigration security checks to evade authorities, including Alvin Tan and even Raja Petra Kamaruddin.

Was neither of this under the director-general’s purview?

Yet now, he is given absolute authority to determine if Malaysians can leave or not?

This is truly perplexing, especially with government politicians in the past and even now telling Malaysians who criticise the government to get out of the country, how is it the Immigration Department now says critics must stay in Malaysia?

Isn’t that just downright confusing?

If Malays can be confused by a cross on a building, Taoist shrines in public parks, or even given out water bottles, well, this just adds to such a confusion, wouldn’t it?

Shouldn’t the Immigration Department then help lessen such confusion by just making their ‘no exit’ blacklist public?

Doesn’t the department have to provide proper justification other than the standard “orders from above”?

Or is there a legal provision somewhere which can be used to sue the department and the government over loss of income and revenue, if it were a business trip?

Also, what’s the definition of ‘criticising the government’?

Would it include those with an offensive tweet, Facebook status, some random words said at a public forum or even some obscure mamak restaurant during the regular interval bitching session among friends?

Would it include me writing this letter to the press?

I beg for clarification on this matter because it just seems ridiculous that our guaranteed rights to travel freely in the federal constitution has now been absolutely put in the hands of one man who does not even have to provide proper justification of his actions.

We have lived throughout the decades as a nation with very few limitations on traveling, with politicians telling us to leave if we aren’t happy, and yet here we are told that those options are no longer available to us.

Insulating the nation from the rest of the world?

Thus, one has to ask, is the government and the Immigration Department now so concerned over words uttered overseas that they wish to insulate the nation from the rest of the world?

Is that why the Immigration Department is given such absolute authority?

Is it also why the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission are given the absolute authority to censor blogs and websites under the Multimedia Act?

Frankly speaking, isn’t this the same tactic used by Sabah and Sarawak as well, which was guaranteed by the Malaysian Agreement?

Yet those two are legally justified. Under what legal basis does the immigration have such authority?

Care to share that information with the public?

But let us face reality; if this government is running scared to the point of granting carte blanche authority to a department head regardless of absolute power corrupting, then we are definitely reaching an unparalleled level of autocracy.

And if this is truly the same Malaysia that was the home of our forefathers, then it is a far cry from what they envisioned this country to be.