Restructuring Foreign Worker Policy and Community Transformation in Malaysia

Abstract

Malaysia is one of the most rapidly growing economies in Asia and is blessed with foreign workers inflow to sustain the economic growth process. However, the strong national sentiments among the local community, which harbors ill perception towards the foreign workers, lead to regrettably vague policies concerning foreign workers. As far as this issue is concerned, Malaysia needs to reform the policy regulations so that foreign workers will be able to integrate into the economic transformation of the country. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the current regulations regarding foreign workers policy in Malaysia. Arguably, foreign worker regulations can be improved by referring to Malaysia’s past experience and copy the models of other foreign-workers-friendly countries. A process-oriented methodology was adopted in this study to understand the issues associated with foreign workers, community transformation, and policy implementation. The result of this study shows that superior implementation and enforcement of foreign labor regulations would lead to harmonization and transformation of the community.