Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on October 10 - 16, 2016.

 

America’s annual rich list, the Forbes 400, is out. This time, the news narrative centres on the fact that more than a 10th of those who made the list are immigrants — not just from the traditional centres of Russia, Hungary and South America but increasingly from Asia.

In today’s America, billionaires of Asian origin are commonplace, with folks like Patrick Soon-Shiong (South Africa-Chinese, US$9 billion), David Sun (Taiwan, US$5.3 billion), John Tu (China-Taiwan, US$5.3 billion) and Bharat and Neerja Sethi Desai (India, US$1.69 billion) making the list.

With nothing to lose and everything to gain, immigrants have always worked harder and longer than complacent and entitled locals.

How can they not? Sidelined, scorned and deemed pariahs by society for their funny accents, strange and exotic food and bizarre customs, immigrants fight tooth and nail, often working in substandard conditions, to merely survive in their adopted lands.

There is no official ratio, but perhaps for every 100,000 striving immigrants, just one succeeds beyond their wildest imagination to the extent one now sees in the Forbes 400 list.

Nowhere has this phenomenon played out more spectacularly than in the US, where a combination of good luck and forward planning have made it the richest country in the world.

Thanks to policies that have included relatively open immigration, the promise of a safe harbour for refugees and an open economy that makes it easy-ish to develop ideas and exploit them commercially, the ensuing growth has made the US what it is today.

Through the centuries, as boat after groaning boat loaded with refugees from war-torn Europe sailed into New York harbour, their first sight was of the Statue of Liberty, on whose broad flanks were etched messages such as this: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” 

But the world is changing, and rapidly.

Wall Street’s greed and America’s inability to jail corporate criminals have resulted in a massive rich-poor divide that has breathed life into mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers like Donald Trump, a rabid billionaire who threatens to dissolve the very openness that made America so wealthy, with his Mexican wall, Chinese trade barriers and policy on Muslim visitors.

As the legendary Russian-American dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov lamented recently, “Forty-two years ago, I left a country that built walls to come to a place without them. But today, as an American citizen, for the first time, I’m hearing rhetoric that reminds me of the Soviet Union of my youth, where it was a crime to be different”.

If Trump does the impossible and indeed becomes president, it is more than highly probable that his policies might just reverse the course of the American economy.

What will that mean for us?

Well, our course is already changing. Thanks to a wealth of natural resources, Malaysia has taken its place as one of Asean’s success stories, and all this in spite of (not because of) the current administration’s policies.

Like it or not, Malaysia is today a magnet for immigrants, both legal and illegal.

The latest population census shows that 10.3% of Malaysia’s 31.7 million people are foreigners, hailing from neighbouring Indonesia and from poverty-stricken, undeveloped, despotic and war-torn areas like Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Ivory Coast and Timor Leste, among dozens of other challenged regions.

Granted, immigrants, especially the unwanted ones, are costly and a burden on the system, but their base effect is, by and large, positive.

Filling the so-called “3D” (dangerous, dirty and difficult) jobs that any self-respecting Malay, Indian or Chinese are loath to perform, these are the workers on whom Malaysia’s economic miracle is built.

Mostly found on construction sites, in factories and palm oil plantations, restaurants, toilets and condominium guardhouses, foreign workers, not locals, are the cogs on which Malaysia operates and builds its superstructures.

Like most immigrants, they are sidelined, scorned and deemed pariahs by society for their funny accents, strange and exotic food and bizarre customs.

But maybe, just maybe, Malaysia is right now in a very similar situation to the America of yore, where the world’s poor, tired and hungry came to find a better life for themselves.

Barring the criminal immigrant minority (which recipient nation does not suffer from this band?), we could be entering an age where millions of hardworking foreigners contribute more and more significantly to the local economy.

And as they skill up and more knowledge transfers to them from their bosses and colleagues, their economic contribution can only increase as the years go by. Heaven knows, Malaysia has already enjoyed one halcyon period of immigrant wealth.

A period where a poor and hardworking class of workers were brought in by the British to build the railways, serve as general labourers and work the tea and rubber plantations.

The Chinese and Indians worked themselves to the bone, becoming so successful and financially well-situated that social policies had to be implemented to rebalance the country’s wealth.

We now know that these policies are both counterproductive and anything but redistributive. But given the ever-increasing influx of foreign workers into the system, policy can and should alter and evolve.

Lessons must be learnt, after all.

Not only to allow and perhaps even encourage and educate these hardworking foreign workers to play an ever-larger role in the economy, but to also address the impediments to our passage up the value chain so that Malaysia may one day enjoy a similar quality of life as those doggone Americans.


Khoo Hsu Chuang is contributing editor at The Edge

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