The government is considering training female refugees to work as maids to help alleviate a shortage of foreign domestic workers, Home Minister Azmi Khalid said on Tuesday.

"The females who are healthy and want to work as domestic maids, we will allow them to be trained and absorbed into the workforce," Azmi told AFP .

Malaysia said last month that it would allow some 60,000 refugees in the country - mainly from Indonesia's Aceh province, Burma and the southern Philippines - to enter the workforce to ease a labour shortage.

Azmi said it made sense to hire refugees - but only those already registered with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees - as they were already familiar with Malaysia.

"Some of them have been here for some time. They speak the language and understand our culture as well so they can enter all categories of workers," he said.

However the minister warned potential refugees against coming to Malaysia to seek work.

"Of course this does not mean we encourage new refugees to come to the country," he said, adding that the government already had a list of refugees eligible to enter the workforce.

No time frame

Azmi said that although there was an in-principle agreement from the cabinet to absorb the refugees, the mechanism for bringing them into the workforce had yet to be decided.

He added that there was no time frame for implementation, but that the government wanted to move "quickly while there is still demand for workers in all sectors."

The government said in May that it would hire more domestic workers from Cambodia, Thailand and Sri Lanka to meet shortages after Indonesians, who make up the bulk of foreign maids here, began opting for other countries offering better salaries.

Malaysia launched a controversial operation in March to round up and deport hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly Indonesians, and the crackdown led to an acute labour shortage in some sectors.

Foreign workers, both legal and illegal, number around 2.6 million of Malaysia's 10.5 million-strong workforce.