NST Leader: The Bangladeshi migrant challenge

New Straits Times

15-07-2025

Most Bangladeshis who come to work in Malaysia have one aim: earn decent money and return home.
But an increasing number of them are in the country to start a syndicate or two or to be part of them, peddling fake immigration services or even sham marriages.
Their initial targets were their countrymen, but as their business grew, the net was cast wider, attracting other foreign nationals as clients or fellow peddlers.
The Immigration Department is rightly worried at the growing number of syndicates of such a nature. So must the nation be.
Only recently, the police arrested 36 Bangladeshi nationals in Selangor and Johor allegedly involved in militant activities in a series of raids that began on April 24.
They were alleged to be part of a network that was raising funds from Bangladeshi migrant workers for terrorist activities in Syria and Bangladesh, with the aim of overthrowing the governments there.
Of the 36, 15 have been deported and the rest have either been charged for terrorism offences or are under detention under the Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012.
This may be a developing story for now, but it has a troubling past in the country.
In 2015, the police arrested five people for being involved in militant networks, one of whom was a Bangladeshi.
The following year, a Bangladeshi restaurateur was arrested for weapons trafficking following an Interpol alert.
In January 2017, two Bangladeshi nationals were arrested — one in Kuala Lumpur and another in Sabah — for alleged involvement with a terror cell in the Philippines.
The presence of the Bangladeshi syndicates and terrorist cells here points to at least two recurring issues: weakness in enforcement and corruption among officers.
One estimate puts the number of Bangladeshi migrant workers legally in the country at 900,000.
And we haven't even added the undocumented Bangladeshi workers being engaged by errant employers.
To be fair to our enforcement agencies, that is one huge number of people to keep an eye on.
But robust oversight can be made to happen at the beginning of the migrant workers' entry into and exit out of the country.
The first is possible by working with the government of Bangladesh in ensuring that only Bangladeshis with squeaky clean records are permitted to work in Malaysia.
Our embassy in Dhaka can provide the extra oversight. But that doesn't mean our enforcement agencies needn't keep an eye on them once they are here.
Even the squeaky clean can be influenced by ideology or money. The second is to make employers responsible for the exit of the migrant workers after their contracts end.
Employing locals will help, too.
Robust enforcement also means getting rid of the undocumented migrant workers of all nationalities in the country, estimated to be between 1.2 and 3.5 million as at December 2022 by the Malaysian Bar.
One of the reasons why there are so many undocumented foreign workers in the country is the prevalence of corruption among enforcement officers.
Two things need to be done to help curb it. One, recruit only officers with integrity.