A bitter row over Malaysia's treatment of illegal immigrants has rekindled old animosities and revealed the new strains that different levels of economic development have placed on regional relations.

Relatively rich Malaysia has been denounced in the Philippines and Indonesia as "arrogant", "insulting" and "inhumane" for driving hundreds of thousands of impoverished migrant workers out of the country, and caning and jailing those who fail to flee.

In turn, some commentators in Malaysia, a fellow member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), have taken the attitude that the plight of the migrant workers should be laid at the doors of their own governments.

Indonesian illegal immigrants are "the victims of official corruption, which has over the last half a century impoverished" a potentially rich country, the president of Transparency International Malaysia, Abdul Aziz, wrote in the New Straits Times .

"It sounds terribly hollow and hypocritical to talk about human rights for their illegals in Malaysia when it is the denial of human rights at home - the rights to food, drinking water, housing, security and employment - that have driven millions of Filipinos and Indonesians to the four corners of the globe to escape from the grinding poverty."