Cheated on 6P, terrified migrants ride out raids

In a game of cat-and-mouse, Zaw Myint, 37, from Myanmar hopes that a piece of paper he holds will keep him safe.

“The police officer who took my report said that, if I get caught, I should show this paper. He said the police won't catch me. But I'm not sure about the Immigration Department,” Zaw said in halting Malay.

“Whenever I hear of a raid, I just run and hide. I don't want to go to jail. Jail is for bad people, the people back home will talk. It will embarrass my son.”

According to the document - copy of a police report he lodged last month - Zaw had paid a company RM5,320 over the past two years to be legalised as a foreign worker under the 6P programme.

But like hundreds, or possibly thousands of others, he is not only without a work permit but is stranded in Malaysia without a passport.

“My wife is terrified. She wants to go back. We have been told there's a way to travel back via Thailand, at a cost of RM900. I told her we'll make a decision soon, but if we go back, the agent will be happy.”

Unlike Zaw, whose employer excuses his absence whenever there are rumours of a raid, his wife's employer has threatened to sack her if she does not turn up for work, raids notwithstanding.

“If it's the police we don't mind. We can just negotiate with them, give them some money, and they'll let us go,” Zaw said.

Once, he said, when he still had his passport and a valid work permit, the police had stopped him and claimed he was not allowed to travel away from the state where he was registered to work.

“They took me in the police car but we never got to the police station. We just went round and round. After a while, I realised they wouldn't let me go unless I paid them, so I gave them RM50.

“But I think it doesn't work this way with the Immigration Department. I've never had an encounter with them though.”

The only other relative Zaw (right) has in Malaysia is his sister-in-law, who works in Johor. Having arrived a few years after the couple, she barely speaks Bahasa Malaysia.

“It's quite worrying. She's there with some other Myanmarese and they help her communicate, but I hear some of them have been arrested. We call her often, and so far she's still safe.”

Between them, the couple, who came to Malaysia on work visas in 2008, make about RM2,000 a month and they try to send half of it to their parents who take care of their now teenage son.

“The agent called me every few months to say I need to pay more for this or that. Each time I would ask my employer for an advance and he'd deduct the sum from my salary for the next month,” Zaw said, showing a stack of receipts.

“It's a lot of money. But we want to be legalised. We just came here to work. We want to be able to pay for our son's education.”

‘Why is agency still operating?’

Zaw said he had trusted the agent because the company had advertised in a Myanmar magazine circulating in Kuala Lumpur, and the company also runs a big restaurant.

“When I first went to register, there were hundreds of people waiting in queue. We arrived at 9am and only managed to register at 4pm,” he said.

The company, which operates out of Lebuh Pudu in Kuala Lumpur, came with recommendations, said fellow Myanmarese Kyaw Thu Ya Htwe, 33.

“I was employed in a restaurant several years before and my employer then tried to legalise me through a Malay agent, but he was cheated.

“So this time, when I saw it was a Myanmarese agent, I felt more assured,” Kyaw (left) said, referring to a Myanmarese woman listed as the company director with the Companies Commission of Malaysia.

But a year and RM5,000 later, Kyaw too has lodged a police report against the agent and is livid that they are still operating their restaurant as per normal.

Fluent in Bahasa Malaysia from his experience in the service industry, he asked: “Why is this so? In Myanmar, the police would have shut them down already!”

It is this frustration that drove him to meet with Malaysiakini, despite the risk of being nabbed, only a few days after escaping a raid at his housing area in Kuala Lumpur.

“A few locals came and asked around, and we knew something was up. Later trucks came. We ran and hid. Some hid in the drains,” he said.

Luckily for him, Kyaw and his wife were allowed to stay at his employer's house for the time being, although they were told them not to come to work in case of a raid there.

Besides the police report, Kyaw and a group of friends have also lodged a report with the Myanmar Embassy, but they do not have high hopes that it will come to their aid.

“If they wanted to do something, they could have already ... but I think our report was just thrown away.”

Like Zaw, the plucky young man said he may consider taking his wife home to Myanmar but is hoping they can wait out the raids.

In the meantime, he said, he would continue to try to get his money back from the agent.

Coming forward, he admitted, may put his personal safety in danger as he believes that the agent has underworld links.

“But if they beat me up, I'll hit back ... All we want is to be legalised properly. Just name the price. We know this is not our country, that we cannot continue running.”

The government had offered amnesty in June 2011 under the 6P Programme to the large numbers of illegal foreign workers to register to become legal workers.

The exercise was conducted by the Immigration Department over a six-month period, with the aim of identifying the total number of immigrants as well as to have their information recorded in the Home Ministry's biometric system.

Then home minister Hishammuddin Hussein announced on Sept 5, 2011 that 2,320,034 foreign workers and illegals were registered using the biometric system under the 6P amnesty programme when the deadline for registration ended on Aug 31 that year.

The number comprised 1,016,908 legal workers and 1,303,126 illegals and did not include those who refused to register, as well as maids and refugees from Sabah and Sarawak, Hishammuddin had said.

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