Crisis infrastructuring: the Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) programme, 2018–2022

ABSTRACT

The Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) programme, one of the world’s most popular retirement and lifestyle migration programme throughout the 2010s, has been at the receiving end of a series of disruptions that dovetailed the COVID-19 pandemic and Malaysia’s regime change and political crisis during 2018–2022. Drawing from interviews with aspiring migrants, current migrants, and members of the MM2H migration infrastructure, this article examines how various stakeholder groups respond to, defend, challenge and contest the programme’s impending infrastructural breakdown and transformation. It interrogates the discursive strategies used by each group to advance their positions and concerns in their attempts to “rescue” the MM2H migration infrastructure and its existing logics of operation. It advances the concept of “crisis infrastructuring” to capture the repair work and the exploration of alternatives undertaken by constitutive actors when an established migration infrastructure is perceived to be under threat – that is, in crisis. It argues that it is the (perceived) moment of crisis that facilitated infrastructuring efforts in an unprecedented and swift manner.

KEYWORDS:

• crisis
• infrastructuring
• lifestyle migration
• Malaysia
• migration infrastructure

Acknowledgments

I thank Nirmala Arath Prabhakar and Jimin Oh for their research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As will be explained later, the MM2H programme does not cover the states of Sabah and Sarawak which have their own versions of the programme.

2. This number excludes their dependents. Including dependents, the number of MM2H participants during this period was 106,601 (SHAREDA Association 2021).

3. On 1 September 2022, MoHA delivered an unexpected announcement: the Premium Visa Programme (PViP), a derivation of the “enhanced” MM2H programme, would come into effect on October 2022 (Nesheim 2022). The PViP is beyond the purview of this article.

4. With the exception of the follow-up interview with Industry_06 which was conducted in an East Asian language.

5. As it is extremely difficult for this group to obtain permanent residence in Malaysia (see Low 2017, 18–19), the MM2H programme provided an avenue for them to reside in Malaysia.

6. In the November 2022 general elections, BN lost to PH. However, a hung parliament situation led to BN joining PH to form a new coalition government.

7. In February 2023, the Sabah state cabinet gave its in-principle approval to the new Sabah-MM2H programme (Miwii 2023). This development shows that the Sabah state government has conducted its own crisis infrastructuring efforts to protect itself from any reputational and economic risks associated with MoHA’s “enhanced” MM2H programme by creating its own independent MM2H programme.

8. The Home Minister did not explain what he meant by “undesirable activities” or provide any examples. His exact words were: “There are some MM2H participants who use the programme as a transit only [sic] while engaging in many undesirable activities from a national security perspective”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Monash University Malaysia School of Arts and Social Sciences Internal Research Grant IRG-2021-03; and the London School of Economics and Political Science Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre Undergraduate Research Fellowship Scheme 2020/21.