The front-page story in all Malaysian newspapers on Wednesday seemed to be about the 39,000 or so Indian nationals who have apparently overstayed their visas and gone AWOL.

That’s the estimate from the Immigration Department. According to its records, these people have been missing since June last year.

It takes time to analyse the figures, and check and double-check facts. But does it take this long to declare the problem?

All arrival and departure records of citizens and non-citizens are held on a central computer recording facility at the department. For all the boast about the Multimedia Super Corridor, something is terribly amiss here.

bangladesh foreign workers migrants 030108 How can a notorious surveillance state such as Malaysia, which uses an array of anti-democratic laws, systems and institutions to keep check of its citizens’ politics of disenchantment, lose 39,000 foreigners and not know until now?

Abdul Rahman Othman, the director-general of the Immigration Department, told the media that unscrupulous employers could be harbouring these MIA Indians.

That’s stating the obvious, is it not? After all, there’s a long history of unscrupulous business practices in this crony-infested country, especially since the inception of the New Economic Policy and Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s privatisation policies since the 1980s. These policies have nurtured cronies amongst ‘elite’ Malays, Chinese and Indians.

 

But Abdul Rahman couldn’t help himself; he proffered more truisms. For example: “It’s all about supply and demand,” he said. No kidding.

 

Two things he didn’t say, though. One is that there are perhaps more Malaysians today who choose not to work in menial jobs. That’s why employers fill them with migrant labour, legally and illegally.

Second, Abdul Rahman didn’t say how the entire Malaysian immigration system is easily corruptible. Would it be too presumptuous to say that employers may have paid off immigration officials to keep their mouths shut and eyes closed? It’s purely and typically hypocritical of the regime and its asinine bureaucrats to not know that employers are desperately trying to fill vacancies so that they can achieve capacity production output.

 

What’s hypocritical is that these workers, whether legal or illegal, are in turn generating national gross domestic product and national income for Malaysia. What’s also hypocritical is that these employers are exploiting migrant workers to the hilt, as they do many Malaysians too, by paying them below the minimum wage and bastardising their labour rights.

 

And all the while the regime has singularly failed to act against these employers nor protect the workers, whether Malaysians or migrant workers. It’s all too convenient, is it not? Or conniving?

 

But isn’t that how things work in Malaysia? Isn’t this emblematic of the entire system of administration in Malaysia? The Umno-controlled BN government is run by their own kind and for themselves, fattened by greed, corruption and zero moral values.

Why pick on Indian nationals?

 

Where Abdul Rahman’s boss, Prime Minister Najib Razak, has so far chosen to omit categorising others who have overstayed their visas, the Immigration DG said ‘other’ AWOLs included Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Chinese, Hong Kong-ese, Sri Lankans, Burmese, Bhutanese, Nepalis an Taiwanese.

 

With the possible exception of the Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Indonesians, the ‘others’ are non-Muslims.

Yet what are desperate people to do? They do the same thing in Europe and the United States, and in Australia and New Zealand.

 

The news reporting by the loathsome Umno regime’s sycophantic state-controlled media had for days concentrated on only the Indians. It unambiguously smacks of racial bigotry and bald-faced hypocrisy.

 

What about Malaysians who have overstayed their visas in, say, the United Kingdom? If these Malaysians were to be deported, would this regime waste time in labeling the British government of racism? You bet it wouldn’t.

 

Suddenly the regime has decided to act on these AWOLs when it’s clear that they would have known of the extent of this problem since at least 2006. It says a lot about the incompetence of the Umno regime in administering its policies.

 

If you read what Samsudin Baradan, the executive director of the Malaysian Employers’ Federation, had to say about the issue, the government’s policies change so often that employers would not be advised of the changes.

 

A competent government? No way. You know the old computer adage: “Garbage in, garbage out”. It applies to this government and all of its cabinet and their stunningly daft and incompetent underlings.

Najib can do a song-and-dance number when he visits New Delhi, but I’ll bet the Manmohan Singh government would be wondering what on earth to tell this Johnny-come-lately and his brand of crass racism?

Perhaps he would feel more at home when he visits Saudi Arabia, clasping his wife’s shopping list. After all, Saudis are known for their racism and that’ll inspire Najib to reach for loftier ideals of racism and cronyism.

MANJIT BHATIA, an academician and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific.