KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia may freeze permits for foreign workers due to rising unemployment, the country’s Labor Ministry said yesterday, in a move that comes after Singapore said it could return thousands foreign workers.
State news agency Bernama quoted the Director-General of Labor, Ismail Abdul Rahim, as saying that a freeze was one of the ways the government would seek to staunch the rise in unemployment.
He told Bernama that this was one of the options the ministry was actively studying to assist locals who were being displaced from work to be employed.
Official data shows that there are 2.1 million foreigners working in Malaysia, many of them from Indonesia and the Philippines, and that they account for 20 percent of the workforce.
There may be as many as double that number when illegal immigrants are taken into account, according to estimates from some nongovernmental organizations in Malaysia.
Unemployment in the country of 27 million people is forecast by the government to be 3.3 percent this year and economic growth is set to slide to 3.5 percent next year from an estimated 5.5 percent in 2008.
Remittances by foreign workers are key to the economic survival of countries such as the Philippines as payments cover the current account deficit.
According data collated by the United Nations, over eight million Filipinos work overseas and remit over $1 billion a month, around 10 percent of the country’s economic output.
The UN ranks Indonesia second as a labor supplier in Asia with 2.7 million workers overseas and then Myanmar with an estimated 1.8 million.
