Increasingly, the issue of Malaysians migrating overseas has emerged as a hot issue of discussions in the letters column in malaysiakini.

Animals and birds have always migrated with the seasons in search of survival. Human beings tend to do it for what they perceive to be survival as well, except that they do it on a permanent basis.

With the ease of modern means of travel, and the easing of travelling and immigration restrictions, human migration has become a whole new phenomenon in our globalised world.

The trend now seems to indicate a mass exodus of human bodies from South to North, from the undeveloped or the developing world to the developed nations of North America, Europe and Australia/New Zealand.

The motives for such unprecedented migration across regional and national boundaries are obviously economic. Who would want to migrate to Kenya, Cambodia or Iraq?

People migrate to escape poverty, hunger and persecution in their home country. Even the lowliest jobs in the new host country fetch much better returns than the skilled professions at home. Besides, they and their children - can always enjoy far better social and educational amenities in their new found paradise.

For a long while now, in the host countries, we have this stereotyped image of the migrant worker employed in sectors which are shunned by the local population. There, in the large cities and small towns, they form small ethnic cultural enclaves according to where they have originated. More than a few would not be able to speak the official language of their host country.

Old cultural habits tend to thrive in these ethnic communities. In Chinatowns for instance, prostitution, gambling and triads would still persist in many lands. This stereotyped image of the migrant communities may be the main reason for the sense of alienation and prejudice festering among the local, and mainly, Caucasian population.

Exactly how this huge influx of coloured immigrants from overseas can affect the politics and economy of the host nations is a matter for long term study. We have yet to understand the full ramifications of these global phenomena.

Different pattern

That this infusion of foreigners will affect the destiny of nation states in the West is not in doubt though. In a few decades time, it is likely that the Caucasian population will not form the majority in the United States, given the present rate of emigration into that country, legally or otherwise.

Already, one-third of the population of London are not original Londoners. Racism is always a problem among the British police force, while they try to redouble their effort to recruit more policemen from citizens of the coloured persuasions.

In recent decades, a different pattern of mass migration has emerged. The thriving economies of the West have created the need for more and more highly skilled professionals. The prospects for better personal fulfilment and financial rewards have become a suction pump for a massive movement of highly educated professional/business elites from the developing world.

India, for instance, is world renowned for producing highly skilled professionals in the field of information technology. Germany seems to have offered instant citizenship to these Indian experts in computer technology. The US has always enticed many of them with much better working conditions and better pay than their home country.

These new migrants are not likely to eke out a living in their new host countries, by opening laundries or restaurants, and surviving on the goodwill and magnanimity of hite people

They are shoulder-to-shoulder with the local professional elites in terms of income, social status, and lifestyle, and head-and-shoulder above the hoi-polloi, the white and coloured masses caught in their daily struggle to pay bills in jobs that they resent.

From some of the Malaysian professionals who have migrated overseas, we get a stream of letters to malaysiakini, reporting their good fortune, and often making scathing commentaries on the deplorable third-world conditions they have left behind forever.

Why do they bother at all? After all, have they not found their greener pasture, to be enjoyed and cherished? Their report of their own good fortune cannot help those who cannot afford to, or do not want to uproot themselves, except create resentment and envy.

Besides, living and working in the strange worlds of London, Perth and Los Angeles, have they not surrendered their rights of Malaysian citizenship, including that of levying damning criticism against political practices in the land of their birth?

Crisis of identity

That those who have carved out a whole new life in a country overseas continue to comment on Malaysian politics is an indication that migration is a far more complex business at the personal level.

Human character is such that it is not all that easy to up and go live in a different country, severed forever from the friends and relatives with whom one grows up in the early formative years. An act of migration, especially for highly-educated and sophisticated people, will more than likely bring about a crisis if identity.

There may be feelings of guilt as well, for those loved ones who have been left behind, to languish under the oppressive conditions at home. Periodic visits back to the old kampongs may assuage the pain. But as Aristotle pointed out, friendship and love are best nourished and enjoyed when we live together.

I doubt very much whether these professional men and women who have chosen to move their fortune and their identity to another land can be totally integrated in their lifetime. They may have escaped the political and other forms of alienation at home, but surely that alienation must emerge in their new home in other forms of manifestation? Is not alienation a condition of human existence in modern life?

True and total integration will come only after the second or third generation. For those who claim to have migrated for the educational future of their children, they may have to face another round of alienation from their children somewhere down the line. Those children who have grown up and been educated in the host countries may turn out to be total strangers!

Somehow, the land and sea that have nourished and nurtured us in our childhood exert a mystical pull on our soul. To cut that spiritual and emotional umbilical chord is to do permanent injury to our sense of self.

Perhaps it is out of this lingering concern for the homeland that can never be exiled, that those who have voted with their feet continue to write commentaries in Malaysian media.

To dismiss them with the derogatory remark 'good riddance to bad garbage' is unfair.

Local commentators in Malaysia may enjoy the advantage of intimate local knowledge through total immersion in our national life. The lingering migrants however, have the advantage of a certain degree of objectivity that comes with distance in space and time. They also have the advantage of comparison, and may give us an inkling of how things could have been. Possibilities are always windows to freedom.

Share same concern

Besides, the political and other forces that drive Malaysian citizens away from their homeland by the millions are still with those who stay behind. We are all victims of the same web of injustices and corruption that are continuing unabated. Overseas or otherwise, we share the same concern. Voicing this collective concern is one step from doing something about our common lot as fellow human beings with a Malaysian name tag.

The home is where the heart is. By the mid-seventies, I was already a permanent resident of Canada, having studied, lived and worked in that idyllic expansive world for eight years.

Though thriving in the empty flattened majestic frozen landscape of the great Canadian Prairies, I was haunted by the memories of the rain-swept rolling green hills and mountains of Sarawak. I missed the cacophony of bird-sounds in the morning and the hardy brown faces back home.

One night, lying alone and sleepless in my frozen bed, while a howling blizzard ravaged in a cold white world outside, and the temperature had dipped below minus 40 degree C, I thought painfully of kangkong stir-fried with sambal belachan ala my mother's recipe. I decided to go home, where the heart is.

It was my personal choice, and the question of what if seldom visited upon my life afterwards. It is a choice I would not impose on anyone.

Naturally, I disagree with friends and relatives who plan on migrating overseas afterwards. I kept my reservation to myself on a personal level. Having gone through the painful process of growing up in Malaysia, and having lived and worked under much better conditions in Canada, I cannot find the moral high-ground from which to deliver my thunderbolts of moral condemnation.

After all, my father and mother were first-generation migrants to Sarawak as well. If they had not sailed with the monsoon wind, to escape the war and the poverty in China, where would I be today?

Then again, if anthropologists were to be believed, our species of Homo Sapiens emerged on the plains of Africa a few million years ago.

Take away the cloak of man-made ideologies like nations and nationalism, and we are all human beings and descendents of migrants - without exception.