FEB 16 — There is a joke going around: “When Vietnamese people come, cats and dogs disappear; when Bangladesh people come, girls disappear; and when Chinese women come, husbands disappear...”
The country will have to pay the price if it has to rely on foreign labour to support the economy. Just like Singapore, the two casinos have brought a rampant gambling addiction and as a result it has to bear the consequence of an increased crime rate and social problems.
How could foreign worker problem remain unsolved even after more than 20 years? The Sin Chew Daily has a series of detailed reports on the issue and I am not going to repeat them here. Let’s see how overstaying workers and prostitutes consume our national resources and bring negative impacts to the society.
During the three-day holiday break in early February, many foreign workers from the periphery of Kuala Lumpur flocked to the city.
There are 1,016,908 legal and over 2.2 million illegal foreign workers in the country. If half of them sought the services of prostitutes, it would be 1.6 million. It is indeed a very large customer group in the prostitution market. Whenever there is a demand, there will always be a corresponding supply. In addition to foreign workers, there are also demands from local people. This is also one of the factors for rampant prostitution in the country.
There is always a syndicate operating behind the scenes that brings in foreign prostitutes, including recruiting prostitutes via the Internet, arranging accommodation, looking for business locations and drawing a “system” for profit and commission sharing. Prostitution brings huge profits and it is also why motels offering low hourly rates have mushroomed all over the country. The underworld is attracted by the huge profits and thus, they intervened while unlawful organisations might also control the prostitutes with drugs. Drug-addicted prostitutes usually work for the syndicate for free until they can no longer bring profit.
Prostitution involving foreigners has been operated for quite a long time and rooted in the country. It is not easy to eradicate it. Even if the police and local governments are willing to spend a lot of manpower and human resources to raid and send foreign prostitutes back to their original countries, the syndicates would immediately bring them back through the back door.
Foreign prostitutes destroy families and tempt young people. It is believed that societal values will as well be threatened if the prostitution industry continues to grow.
The 6P legalisation exercise has further relaxed foreign worker recruitment conditions, such as allowing foreign workers in 21 sectors to join the legalisation programme. Since the government knows that the industrial mode of production has not been changed after a large number of foreign workers have been brought into the country since the 1980s, why do they still want to legalise so many foreign workers? The economy would never be transformed and the country would never achieve the goal of high-income economy if we continue relying on foreign workers.
More than 1.7 million foreign workers have registered, while the numbers of legal and illegal foreign workers as well as overstaying foreigners have been surging. Together with foreigners involved in prostitution, drug trafficking and other criminal activities, it will be difficult for the police to eradicate the spider-web-like interest relations. I am afraid that it has also contributed to the country’s high crime index.
The prostitution market and human trafficking have formed a thriving underground economy. However, they have at the same time become a disgraceful label of our country. — mysinchew.com
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.
