Malaysia's conflict with the Philippines and Indonesia over labour migration: economic security, interdependence and conflict trajectories

Abstract

If labour migration increases the potential for interstate conflicts, does the economic interdependence thus created make such conflicts easier to address, given the economic gains to both sides from such labour movements? This article addresses this question by using the concepts of economic security and interdependence to compare the Malaysia-Philippines and Malaysia-Indonesia conflicts over labour migration. Although the limited cases make generalizations difficult, the analysis suggests that the economic interdependence constraint on conflict escalation may not always work well as it may be offset by national security concerns in the labour receiving states about the illegal migrant workers and by the shifting economic underpinnings of economic security. The theoretically pacifying effect of interdependence can also be weakened by preventing the ‘aggrieved country’ from articulating clearer demands from the other side for fear of jeopardizing the economic gains from the migrant outflows. Comparing the two conflicts suggests that clearly articulated demands matched by effective state capacity in translating those demands into actions on the ground can help in conflict management. The potential for the migrant worker issue to evoke deep emotions and the ease with which that can translate into nationalist outpourings mean that both sending and receiving countries must develop bilateral or regional frameworks that outline clear best practice standards for the treatment of migrant workers, including during detention and repatriation.

Keywords:

• economic security
• labour migration
• interdependence
• interstate conflict
• Malaysia-Indonesia
• Malaysia-Philippines

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to John Ravenhill, Andrew McIntyre, Stuart Harris, Benjamin Goldsmith, Natasha Hamilton-Hart, Andrew Phillips, Vinod Aggarwal and The Pacific Review's anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions on improving this article. This article was part of the research for the Australian National University's component of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Asia Security Initiative. The generous support of the Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. Migrant workers are a sub-category of economic migrants who move abroad to find temporary or contractual work, while economic emigrants move abroad to find permanent employment.

2. Following the migration studies literature, I use the terms, ‘receiving countries’ and ‘host countries’, to indicate countries to which migrant workers move in search of jobs, while their countries of origin are termed ‘home countries’ or ‘sending countries’.

3. See Huysmans and Squire (2010); Mitchell (1989); Rudolph (2003, 2006); Wiener (1985, 1992-93).

4. For examples of these studies, see Boutin's (2011) review of economic security and interdependence.

5. See Mitchell (1989); Rudolph (2003); Wiener (1992-93).

6. These works include Arifianto (2009), Liow (2003), Mak (2007) and Pandu (2007). Franco Jr (2006) discusses the Philippines-Malaysia conflict in the light of an earlier conflict between the Philippines and Singapore.

7. Sensitivity depends on how quickly and at what cost a country in an interdependent relationship is affected by changes in the other country. Vulnerability is characterized by the country's inability to overcome these costly effects (Keohane and Nye 1977).

8. Federal authorities had been accused of legalizing these migrants by providing them with official Malaysian identity cards. See Mak (2007) and Sadiq (2005).

9. Statistics on migrant workers, particularly of undocumented workers, are patchy, inconsistent and contested (Kanapathy 2005).

10. Official figures are from the Ministry of Finance, Malaysia (2010).

11. Data on migrant workers in Malaysia provided by Deputy Home Minister Chor Chee Heung to Parliament and reported in Migration News (2009); total workforce details obtained from Employment Time-Series data from the Ministry of Human Resources, Malaysia; accessed at http://www.statistics.gov.my/portal/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=551&Itemid=67&lang=en, 29 October 2010.

12. By the end of 2004, 11,473 Indonesians out of a total of 18,607 illegal migrants had been caned (Yaakub 2009: 155).

13. On how scholars tend to view Indonesian actions, see Hamilton-Hart (2009: 266).

14. See Liow (2003) on the Indonesia-Malaysia ‘kinship’ factor.

15. See Najib (2010).