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Asia's regional labor tensions
grow
By John Berthelsen
The
increasing tempo of immigration roundups in Japan and
Korea is shining the spotlight on an issue that has
long been largely a Western concern. As Asia becomes
more prosperous, intra-regional immigration, both legal
and illegal, is skyrocketing and raising social tensions
in what for generations have mostly been homogenous,
mono-ethnic societies.
These foreign workers are
a growing necessity for Asia's increasingly prosperous
employers, who find in them people who are hungry for
jobs that local countrymen regard as dirty, dangerous or
demeaning - just as Western businessmen have known for
decades. Where poverty-stricken Chinese long saw their
future in Jinshan - gold mountain, their name first for
San Francisco, and later for the United States - and
Indians, Pakistanis and Filipinos fled towards the oil
fields of the Middle East and the factories of Germany,
France and England, today Korea, Japan and Taiwan are
increasingly becoming magnets for such economic boat
people.
Multi-ethnic Western societies,
particularly the US with its polyglot agglomeration of
races, religions and ethnic groups, have absorbed waves
of immigration, sometimes with ease, sometimes with
severe hostility. The Asian nations do not appear able
to deal with that reality yet. Both Japan and Korea have
ordered Draconian crackdowns on overstayed migrants in
recent weeks.
The outbreak of Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome in early 2003 spurred some of these
xenophobic tendencies. Eric Teo Chu Cheow, council
secretary of the Singapore Institute of International
Affairs and a resource panel member of the Singapore
Parliamentary Committee on Defense and Foreign Affairs,
wrote in April that "viruses, like a myriad of other
cross-border problems, still fester across the region.
These problems include the rapid spread of deadly
diseases and AIDS, the trafficking of drugs, arms, women
and children as well as clandestine labor movement, and
environmental and health hazards."
International
immigration for employment has grown so rapidly as an
economic and social phenomenon in Asia, according to the
United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia
and the Pacific (UNESCAP) that there currently about 5.5
million migrant workers are in the main destination
economies in East and Southeast Asia.
Official
deployments from major countries of origin, at about 1
million workers in 1990, more than doubled to 2.4
million by the end of the decade, although real numbers
are far higher because so many migrate without
registering with national authorities, and bring
UNESCAP's total to 5.5 million.
"Social issues
are emerging because of the millions of international
migrants working outside of their home countries,"
according to the UNESCAP report, prepared for the Fifth
Asian and Pacific Population Conference in Bangkok in
December 2002. "The scope of international labor
migration requires more thorough planning at the
national level and among countries at the regional and
sub-regional level."
Certainly there are plenty
of social issues. There are concerns over the impact on
Asia's traditionally strong family structures,
particularly when women leave, as they do in the
Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and other countries to
become domestics elsewhere. Migration, the UN report
points out, has the potential to improve the status and
autonomy of women, whether they are the migrants or
their husbands are and they are left alone to care for
the family.
Human trafficking is obviously a
serious problem, with estimates of the annual number of
women and children victims in Southeast Asia as high as
200,000 to 225,000 and on the rise because of the
increasing involvement of organized crime.
Nonetheless, remittances of earnings from
overseas workers are enormously important to the
countries of origin as well as to the families left
behind, who use the money largely for subsistence, but
do manage to put some into homebuilding and a small
amount for investment. According to the World Bank, they
are the third world's second-largest source of
development capital, behind foreign direct investment
but well outpacing either capital market flows or
official development assistance. These remittances
amounted to US$72.3 billion in 2001, or 1.3 percent of
the world's gross domestic product.
The changing
demographics of immigration are clearly shown in the
UNESCAP document from the 2002 Bangkok meeting. In 1990,
65 percent of the workers leaving the Philippines were
going to the Middle East, only 27 percent seeking work
in Asia itself. By 1998, the number of workers going to
the Middle East had fallen to 47 percent, with the
numbers working in Asia rising to 46 percent. The two
Gulf Wars have changed the face of immigration
dramatically as Asian workers shy away from war zones.
Thailand in 1999 deployed more than 202,000 workers
overseas, with only 9 percent going to the Middle East.
A full 89 percent were in Asia, with 57 percent going to
Taiwan alone.
There are significant population
movements across land borders between India and Nepal,
Bangladesh to India, China and Russia. There are also
huge internal migrations, such as those in China, where
hundreds of thousands of people are constantly on the
move. Interestingly enough, much of this labor migration
is a crawl up the economic ladder, with Burmese fleeing
to Thailand to take jobs vacated by Thais on their way
to the Middle East or Hong Kong to take jobs that
affluent Arabs or Chinese won't do.
The
Philippines is traditionally the biggest provider of
what UNESCAP calls "annual deployments", with as many as
800,000 moving to other countries looking for work.
Indonesia and India normally send about 400,000 abroad,
with Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand
routinely deploying 100,000 to 200,000.
As a
percentage of the labor force, these economic migrants
are flooding into the most open societies. Although
Brunei is an anomaly, with 36 percent of its workers
from outside the tiny, oil-steeped sultanate, Singapore
is second, with 24 percent of its workers from overseas,
working in a wide variety of skill levels to sustain its
economic output.
The richest of the industrial
countries, Japan and Korea, however, are doing their
best to keep them out or limit their access. The work
force in Japan, with the most developed industrial
society in Asia, is comprised of less than 1 percent
foreign workers, compared to other industrialized
societies such as the US, with far higher numbers.
Japan aims to keep it that way. Politicians in
recent elections inveighed against foreign criminals and
newspapers editorialized against their influence. In
September, authorities responded by going after as many
as 250,000 foreign workers believed to have overstayed
their visas in the biggest dragnet for foreigners ever
recorded in a single swoop.
A breakdown of
foreign workers by Japan's Ministry of Justice shows
that the biggest single category for foreign workers is
entertainers, most of them from the Philippines, who
work in Japan's bars. The second largest group is
"trainees", who are allowed to stay up to three years.
In reality, they are guest workers.
Korea,
relatively new to the concept of labor shortages and
domestic workers who don't want to do dirty or demeaning
jobs, has about 630,000 foreign workers, accounting for
about 1.3 percent of its 49 million population. Of
those, about 290,000 are undocumented. Under the
provisions of a law passed recently, unregistered
migrant workers were ordered to be out of Korea by
November 14, with those employing them to be fined
20,000 won (US$17,000) if they were caught. The
dislocations have been wrenching, with four workers
committing suicide and others hiding in empty buildings
or running for their lives to get away from immigration
authorities.
UNESCAP asks: Does a true regional
labor market exist across Asia? True labor markets imply
that labor demand and supply cross international
boundaries to other countries, with workers having
access to information about jobs and being able to
choose between them. There would be some convergence in
wage levels, and there would be unified laws,
regulations and labor-related institutions.
Certainly, the UN agency says, the latter two
are nonexistent except in certain highly-specialized
occupations such as information technology or
manufacturing. But, the report says, a Thai construction
worker may well have at least partial information about
work opportunities in other regional countries.
Because so much of the labor migration within
the region has been clandestine or irregular, as the
Korean and Japanese authorities can attest, the rights
and benefits of migrant workers are often weak, and for
those on the run, nonexistent.
Governments,
partly because of rife xenophobia, have been slow to
recognize the value of such overseas employment. But, as
the countries grow in prosperity and, in the case of
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and other developed
economies, birth rates continue to fall below
replacement levels and they inevitably must turn to
international labor migration to maintain their economic
status.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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