Everywhere you go and everywhere you see, the foreign invasion of migrant workers pursuing menial jobs Malaysians don’t want to get paid for anymore is startling and pervasive. It has been so since this country decided to lurch towards industrialisation, commerce and knowledge. The foreign invasion has spread to literally every nook and cranny in the peninsula where labour-intensive jobs, the ones that demand workers to profusely sweat under the sun, kneel and crawl over dirt and muck, and dig and scrape until blisters form and the back strains.

Malaysians have long dumped jobs that requires floor sweeping, window cleaning, toilet flushing, dish cleaning and leftovers clearing – the pay is terrible, unless it is a job frying fries and grilling burgers at the multinationals of McDonald’s and Burger King where the money is sweet enough for younger Malaysians to ignore any little snobbery of status consciousness.

For most Malaysians, other than the ones with the deep felt paranoia of being overwhelmed by foreigners, the presence of these migrant workers are shrugged off nonchalantly as a non-threat and even welcomed. If Malaysians don’t want these low-paying jobs, the foreigners are more than welcome to it. It is a cycle that every developed nation has experienced – Latin Americans and Mexicans to America, and Indians, Pakistanis and Middle Easterners to Britain and Europe.

But that’s just stating one part of the story. The other part tells that the country has climbed the socio-economic strata of wealth and success that Malaysians wanting to earn better wages and enjoy an even more sumptuous lifestyle must hop over to countries where the money, digs, entertainment, cuisine and general well-being is more superior. Like Singapore, Japan, Australia and New Zealand where wages double or triple. The inflation and cost of living spike too but once Malaysians migrate there, they earn, live and breathe better, and rarely do they return home, just like most migrants who decided that Malaysia is their permanent home, at least for their progeny.

It’s the sign of the times and a huge milestone that adduces Malaysia as a foreign worker’s paradise where employers have little trouble convincing them to dump their dumps there and work here, even f it meant seven persons to a room. Of course, the foreign invasion has also something to do with Malaysian employers prejudiced by the mindset that since such jobs have little to clamour for and even less of a future, there was no need to pay big bucks for work that can break your backs.
Malaysians have shrewdly graduated from that epoch of hard living while the Indonesians, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, Filipinos, Indians, Chinese and Vietnamese, no strangers to their current epoch of adversity and hardship, have long been thankful for the locals’ animus towards hard labour to gleefully grab these jobs that pay more in a week or a month than they could earn in a year back home.

This is the environment that we have accommodated for these foreigners and it is they who we have embraced for the past three decades or so. It’s a swell deal for everyone, a win-win situation if you must, so there should be some trepidation, a little ripple in the comfort zone, when Deputy Home Minister Datuk Chor Chee Heung mentioned something rather alarming at the Dewan Rakyat today: the Government intends to reduce the recruitment of foreign workers to give more job opportunities to locals.

Chor did not specifically mention which sectors would be affected, other than infer that due to global economic downturn, many Malaysians working overseas are expected to come home by aircraft-loads. However, he was forthcoming in his interim appraisal of the coming tide: “…we don't know whether they are willing to take over the jobs that foreign workers are doing now," he told Nasharuddin Mat Isa (Pas-Bachok).

Chor also mentioned that there are now 2.1 million legal foreign workers mostly attached to the following sectors: manufacturing (749,173), plantation (347,730), construction (307,779), domestic help (296,334), services (211,057) and agriculture (184,602). Indonesian migrants top at 1,172, 990, followed by Nepal (199,962), India (130,768), Vietnam (96,892) and Bangladesh (64,156). That’s a lot of foreign help. According to the rule of the thumb, for every single legal worker, there’s his wife, child and two other kin or village buddies tagging along illegally, at least those from one of our immediate neighbours.

Conservatively, there might be a handful or more million foreigners traversing the countryside working illegally and silently, vulnerable to exploitation and violence with little means of aid and rescue, other than their own wits, resourcefulness and a readiness to do battle to the death to garrison their meagre belongings, shanty living and measly savings.

Interestingly, the levies collected from the 2.1 million legal migrant workers adds up to RM2.1 billion in 2007 but Chor did not say how much is bleeding out through remittance to these workers’ respective home countries. Let’s do the simple math: if 2.1 million send home a minimum of RM100 per person per month, that sums up to RM2.52 billion annually. That’s money not spent here to weigh down the looming global recession. No wonder the Philippines regard foreign remittance from their maids and nightclub acts as national earnings.

Back to that rippling effect that Chor stirred: if the Government sends home, say about 200,000 migrants by next year to immediately trim 2.1 million to 1.8 million and trim another 300,000 by 2015, the big question is – just who is going to mind the kids, clean the house, mop the floor and do the laundry? Who is going to pluck the oil palm fruits, man the mall security, and clear the leftovers? Who is going to help build the next spanking mall, high-rise tower and mega projects that are part and parcel of the national dream and ambitions?

It certainly won’t be the locals, who have long abandoned these kinds of jobs while eyeing more lucrative ventures like opening up new eating stalls, the only guaranteed recession-proof business, that also need these migrant workers to help clear the leftovers and wait on customers.

There can only be one outcome of the Government’s bid: get rid of 200,000 to 300,000 legal migrant workers but the same ousted ones will return, this time illegally and likely to seek the same employers who by then would have mastered their cat-and-mouse game with the enforcement authorities, who by the same token would have brushed up on their detection skills.

But the bigger implication is that what is legal now will lapse into illicitness. Right now, illegal migrant workers are just that: illegal and easy to catch and deport but Chor’s statement may just entail the prospect of a new kind of market forces – organised black market for migrant labour. This can’t be good.