16 May 2007
Opinions
We wake up each morning to be served with the breakfast prepared by the Indonesian kakak. As we are stepping out of the house, our neighbour renovating his house comes into sight, and hammering and hitting hard on the roof are familiar yellow-faced Vietnamese workers. Doing the routine morning market shopping, we hear Chinese women hawking their stuff loudly. And as we step inside the office, the mat salleh superior hastily calls for a meeting; while on the other end of your handphone, the Japanese client says he has some orders to make.
The above may be just part and parcel of our daily life. Without we realising it, many working around us are no longer only those sharing the same skin colour and accent with us. They could have hailed from somewhere else, the so-called migrant workers.
In the understanding of most modern people, migrants travel out of their native countries in search of greener pastures.
With transportation technology developing by leaps and bounds, migration is no longer that difficult after all. The advent of aircraft has further shortened travelling times and distances, making migration increasingly commonplace.
According to a UN report released in March, from now through 2050, the world will see a wave of continuous and massive migratory movements of a magnitude unseen before. In affluent countries, especially, at least 2.2 million new immigrants are expected to arrive each year.
Today, we have many different kinds of migrants, including the well-to-do investing migrants looking for a better retirement. For instance, following the phenomenal growth in China's economy in recent years, we have seen a multitude of businessmen hurrying there to grab a share of the lucrative economic cake, many ending up settling there.
Another more common type of migrants are the migrant workers. If you are applying for a job now, there is always a field in the form requiring you to indicate whether you are willing to travel on assignment. This is particularly prevalent in multinational corporations, or we won't see the publication of books like The World Is Flat.
Migration is not exclusive to the rich, the economically deprived can travel abroad to seek a better living too. Take a look at the multitude of migrant workers in our midst--they have come here in bulk just because they can't get decent well-paying jobs back home.
And then we have another category of migrants--the political migrants--as typified by those making an exodus from Hong Kong in the run-up to the 1997 Chinese takeover. Many were worried about their fundamental rights being deprived and their personal properties being confiscated upon returning to their homeland, and decided to move their entire families abroad.
Of course, migration is not a new phenomenon emerging within the past couple of centuries. Migration began as early as the colonialist expansion, and we can comfortably say that migration was a by-product of colonialism.
The United States has just celebrated the 400th anniversary of the estalishment of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World. In May 1607, 400 years from now, 104 Englishmen landed on the New World in three seafaring vessels. They only had one motive back then. They had anticipated that gold was everywhere in the New World, but were instead greeted by the barren marshland before their eyes.
Since they had travelled that far from home, the Englishmen made up their minds to settle by the river estuary. They planted the Union Jack, named the settlement after King James, the ruling monarch then, and carried on with their gold rush.
Subsequently, more and more Englishmen landed on the New World to escape epidemic and religious persecution. More and more land was cleared, and the powerful nation we see today began to take shape.
Obviously the migration phenomenon does not end with the demise of colonialism, but continues to exist in a different pattern and manner.
A UK-based Christian humanitarian organisation warns in a recent report that as many as one billion climatic migrants may be moving across borders over the next four decades.
Climatic migrants are forced to migrate due to floods, storms, droughts or famine consequential to global warming. In the 2004 South Asian tsunami for instance, the survivors had to flee their homes due to the flooding of islands and low-lying coastal areas.
Understandably, migrants often come into conflicts with the locals owing to ethnic, religious and cultural differences, creating a certain degree of impact on their new domiciles. This remains a tacky issue in many countries to this day.
The wave of migration is taking on the world in a big way, too big for any of us to ignore.
But is the Malaysian government adequately prepared in the face of this insurmountable wave of migration? Have the authorities stepped up the preventive measures to stem escalating crime following the influx of migrant workers? Meanwhile, is the government doing enough to provide better living conditions to keep skilled Malaysians at home?
When you are turning your head around and are greeted by the sight of ubiquitous migrant workers, don't be taken aback, as you and your family may one day join in the migration bandwagon, too. (By Chua Sze Chih, Sin Chew Daily)
( The opinions expressed by the writer do not necessarily reflect those of Sinchew-i )
Sinchew-i 2007.05.16
