The biggest challenge that refugees face, apart from the harassment and intimidation, is sustaining themselves and their families. FMTNews refugees labour
Last week, Pakistan’s High Commissioner to Malaysia, Amna Baloch, announced that her country was negotiating with Malaysia to provide up to 150,000 low-skilled workers as security guards. She also indicated that the 2005 Malaysia-Pakistan MOU under which some 10,000 to 15,000 Pakistani workers are sent to Malaysia annually would be revised to boost the employment of Pakistanis in Malaysia.
But there’s another aspect to this whole situation that is just as scandalous: the plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees in Malaysia. They come from everywhere – impoverished Yemenis fleeing the brutal Saudi bombing campaign against their country; desperate Rohingya fleeing genocide at the hands of a murderous regime; Muslim Uighurs and Pakistani Christians fleeing religious persecution in their own homelands.
It makes no sense to go on recruiting thousands of low-skilled workers from Pakistan or other countries when we already have a vast pool of unskilled labour right here in our own backyard, thousands of hard-pressed refugees desperate for employment, willing to do even the most menial of jobs to support their families. They are here. They are not going anywhere any time soon.
A Suhakam report last year estimated that in Malaysia the human trafficking trade generated between RM174-RM349 million annually. The discovery of death camps and mass graves along the Malaysia-Thai border were also a shocking indictment of official neglect and even connivance.
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