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I HAVE a confession to make. About a dozen years ago, I wrote to a development issues magazine criticising an article that criticised Malaysians for mistreating foreign workers. I had misguidedly defended the low wages paid to the workers and linked their presence to incidences of crime.

Fast forward to the present, I am much better informed and my views far more moderate but it seems either that too few people share these views or they may be too little too late for Indonesian policymakers who last week suspended sending workers to Malaysia. In these difficult economic times, it must not have been an easy call to make. Countries exporting migrant workers earn large amounts of foreign currency from migrant labour repatriations. Since Malaysia is one of the largest employers of Indonesian workers, the state of affairs must be really dire to provoke such a reaction from Jakarta.

The dilemma posed by employment of migrant workers is a deep rooted one. Human migration, of course, is as old as civilisation but the trend of migration work that we see today appears to have originated from colonial policies of the 18th and 19th centuries. Faced with the challenges of having to quell local opposition while at the same time co-opting locals to support their administration, colonialists  found it easier to rely on imported labour.

The industry has not changed much. Foreign workers in Malaysia are allowed into the country on a temporary basis. Their toil is required but nothing else – they are not accepted into society even though many live in our homes and nothing is planned for their future. I once attended a press conference by a minister who insisted that although Bangladeshi workers are allowed to work in the country for up to seven years, they are not allowed to have any marital relations locally. To believe that people can spend time abroad for years and form no personal relations is naïve to say the least. At worst, it was a calculated form of rights denial.

Certainly, Malaysia is not the only country that faces this predicament of wanting to benefit from the labour of foreign workers without having to provide for them socially. Countries in Europe have been facing this dilemma for decades after the liberal policies of the post-WWII years opened the doors to migrant workers to fuel reconstruction and growth demands.

However, once these jobs dried up and the workers were unwilling to leave after having established roots where they worked, problems mounted. France has difficulties assimilating its Algerian migrants, Germany, its Turkish migrants and the Netherlands, its Moroccan migrants.

Britain is considering a general amnesty to cope with the large numbers of illegal immigrants. In all these countries, governments struggle to deal with the rise of right-wing politics while addressing the social alienation experienced by their migrant populations especially those of the second generation who belong neither in their parents’ country of origin nor in their country of birth.

These examples in Europe are a precursor of what we should expect if we want to continue employing foreign labour or promoting industries that rely heavily on cheap migrant labour. As with many of the migrants who came to Malaya for work two centuries ago and eventually remained as citizens, the same possibilities must be considered for migrant workers who spent years toiling for us. If we are unwilling to do this, it is time to cut the reliance and focus on building industries that are skills based and adapted to local skills levels. This means also that we have to stop creating artificially low-cost bases by importing workers, depressing their wages and exploiting their humanity.