A WORKER from Myanmar is hard to miss if one walks around Kuala Lumpur. These hardworking migrants from a northern neighbour contribute immeasurably to our economy by taking jobs Malaysians now mostly shun.
Some of these migrants are from the discriminated Rohingya community, finding welcome refuge here denied them in their native land. And that seems to be the problem.
A welcome mat stays only for so long as the trickle of people from Myanmar does not threaten to become an uncontrollable deluge as it now appears, with whole families including young children taking to rickety boats in hopes of making it to Malaysia.
As soon as images of such hapless migrants appear on international television, popular sympathies for them follow. As sure as night follows day, our own non-governmental types soon enough weigh in and inevitably it is to apportion blame and on the government, first and foremost, for something the government did not create in the first place.
Perhaps the country’s kindness in offering countless Myanmar citizens a better life chance in Malaysia before counts for little.
Yes, the humanitarian disaster currently unfolding before our shores is immediate and, therefore, demands immediate assistance from the countries affected.
But let us not forget that this is a man-made disaster, not a natural one and Malaysia’s record of humanitarian relief for the latter has often been quick and exemplary.
This is a problem whose root causes are not within our control. It has a powerful push factor from national persecution and discrimination coupled with extreme poverty in Myanmar. That push factor simmered for decades before this but ironically seems to come to a head just as the country democratises and, almost Iraq-like, such social fissures borne of ancient ethnic, religious and other factors open up wide.
Sadly, such destructive and poisonous centrifugal forces come into play first as the genie pops out of the bottle. Myanmar’s well-wishers, particularly those in the West, who reflexively urge and even bully and coerce the country to democratise as the first order of business, are of course seldom if ever careful about what they wish for.
And there is then the pull factor of word no doubt reaching family and friends back in Myanmar from those who have made it in Malaysia of a promised land not far from their own shores.
Human desperation and the promise of something better abroad are the essential ingredients for unscrupulous human traffickers to exploit and a near-perfect storm thus brews beyond our own shores, exploding into this humanitarian disaster that everyone knows to wring his hand about but offers little by way of a realistic and long-lasting solution.
Assuming we offer refuge and sanctuary to these undocumented and, therefore, unwelcome migrants off our shores, what would be the likely effects and consequences? Will it not only serve as powerful incentives for the traffickers to continue sending even more such migrants our way?
And what comforting record has international organisations tasked with such matters as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to offer us that our humanitarian act in extending immediate sanctuary and relief to the latest batch of boat people will be rewarded with swift action to unburden us of such people and the headache they will no doubt land us with?
Illegal migrants are a growing blight all over the world and who is to say that once the immediate spotlight is lifted off the batch now crying out for global attention off our shores, we will not be left pretty much to our own devices to deal with the lingering mess at our own leisure?
Australia is rightly boasting now that its hard-line policy (incidentally enforced by both the current conservative and previous liberal Federal Governments) where migrants ferried by traffickers and aiming for its own shores will be unambiguously stopped in the open seas and turned away is the only realistic answer in the face of the usual international paralysis to get to the bottom of this problem.
Australia has faced international condemnation for its policy towards illegal migrants, not least from the European Union which is itself now hypocritically flailing in its response to its own illegal-migrant problem originating from now politically lawless Libya and its vast hinterland of desperately poor people from the rest of Africa.
As our government now grapples with this unwelcome problem on its hands, the least its usual critics can do is to say nothing if they have nothing coherent to offer by way of a solution.
The writer is a Kuching-based journalist