A friend from a neighbouring country recently made a trip to Malaysia and he recounted a situation he witnessed where a customs officer was berating and physically-manhandling a Bangladeshi national at the KL International Airport.
The meek-mannered foreigner was singled out from a large group of workers, and roughly pushed around and treated with so much disdain and disgust that it made my friend cringe with pity, and burn with anger.
Had I not been witness to the recent backlash of public fury following recent news that our country will be bringing in an additional 1.5 million workers from Bangladesh, I would have had trouble believing his account.
While the government has responded with a temporary freeze on the intake of all foreign workers, the explosion of anti-immigrant sentiments, and anti-Bangladeshi specifically, revealed an ugly xenophobic side to Malaysians.
Malaysians pride ourselves on being a polite, welcoming and friendly people, but it appears that this deference to others only applies to foreigners from more advanced countries.
For the burgeoning population of the country’s new economic migrants, we have reserved the worst of ourselves.
“They are stealing our jobs”, “They will court our wives and rape our daughters” and “They will drive the crime rate up” are just some of the many unproven stereotypes and prejudices Malaysians associate with blue-collar workers from less-developed countries.
But we are forgetting that our country was built on the blood and sweat of immigrants.
Contrary to what some present leaders claim, almost everyone living in this country today – save for the Orang Asli of the Peninsula and Orang Asal from East Malaysia – are descendants of immigrants.
The areas surrounding Jalan Silang in the heart of Kuala Lumpur was once not too long ago the trading centre for new Chinese and Indian-Muslim immigrants who arrived on Malayan shores to carve a better future for themselves, and in doing so, built up the city.
In the place of the old shops plying Chinese sundry goods and Indian fabrics, Nepalese restaurants, Burmese mobile phone shops and Bangladeshi food stalls line the streets today.
The faces and nationalities may have altered the landscape, but the circumstances are not much different from the “original” immigrants of Malaya who sought to create a better life for themselves and their families here.
Instead of perpetuating racist slurs, blaming migrant workers for every imaginable crime and cursing them for taking jobs which most locals don’t even want, we should be questioning the policies and decisions that have led to their influx.
Why does such a large number of foreigners need to be brought in when there are hundreds of thousands of ready workers already in Malaysia in the way of refugees, unregistered foreigners and asylum-seekers?
We should be concerned if our infrastructure and institutions are well-prepared to manage the rapid increase in the number of migrant workers, and if we have in place ways to check on abuses of power, cheating and scams that are common problems faced by the existing millions of migrant workers here.
It is understandable if the outrage against the incoming 1.5 million Bangladeshi nationals is partly due to an overriding sense of fear and insecurity about Malaysia’s financial fundamentals.
But fear and ignorance is no excuse for the level of hypocrisy and disgrace that Malaysians have so far shown to people who have more in common with us than we care to admit.
When Malay supremacists in this country belittle the nation-building contributions of our immigrant forefathers, we cry “racist” with the very same breath that we tell our children to stay away from the “dirty Bangla” or “evil Indon”.
How different are we, then, from those who call out “Cina Babi”, “Balik China” and “Keling Bodoh”?
We can, and should, be better than this chauvinism and ignorance.
On top of a non-existent system of political transparency and a host of self-serving leaders which we cannot seem to remove, let’s not add “xenophobic” and “immigrant-abusers” to our crown of failures. – February 21, 2016.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer, organisation or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.
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