By LIZ GOOCH
Published: October 1, 2010
KUALA LUMPUR — With its dazzling skyscrapers, bright lights and ubiquitous symbols of modernity, Singapore has long worked its magic on Rachel Liew, 20.
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Even as a young girl visiting the city-state with her family from her nativeMalaysia, Singapore’s clean streets, convenient public transportation and modern lifestyles made a lasting impression.
As Ms. Liew grew older, she came to believe that Singapore could also offer a better education than her homeland, and in 2008, she packed her bags and headed south across the border to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering at Nanyang Technological University.
“I might return to Malaysia if I had a really good job offer there, which I think would be unlikely, or if I eventually get married to a Malaysian who wants to live in his hometown,” said Ms. Liew, one of about 700,000 Malaysians living abroad. “But other than that, I think I would probably settle down in Singapore.”
That is exactly the kind of sentiment Malaysia’s policy makers are desperate to change.
Many Asian nations have long been concerned about the outflow of human capital to more developed countries, but here in Malaysia, the need to address the problem has assumed a new urgency in the final decade for reaching its long-established goal of becoming a developed country by 2020.
Companies have long complained about a shortage of skilled labor in Malaysia, and economists say it is severely affecting the country’s ability to attract more high-technology industries. The government is acutely aware of the shortage in skills and the potential hurdle it poses to the country’s 2020 goal.
“We don’t get it right, we are in serious trouble,” the human resources minister, S. Subramaniam, said during an interview.
Studying and working overseas have long been considered attractive options for those Malaysians who can afford to make the move. About half of those living abroad can be found in neighboring Singapore. Australia, Britain and the United States are also popular.
Robert K. Chelliah, who runs an Australian immigration agency in Perth, with offices in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, said by phone that the number of Malaysians contacting his company with inquiries about moving to Australia had soared 80 percent since 2008.
“In the last two to three years, the motivation to acquire Australian permanent residency has sharply increased across all age sectors as well as across racial backgrounds,” he said.
Like Ms Liew, most of the seven people interviewed for this article said that better education, wages and career opportunities could be found abroad, while parents wanted to ensure that their children received an internationally recognized education in English.
Many interviewees, when asked about their concerns about returning to Malaysia, cited racial tensions and the country’s affirmative action policy, which gives special privileges to ethnic Malays, who make up 60 percent of the population. The government has recognized the need to change the policy, which was introduced in the 1970s to improve the economic standing of Malays, who were more highly represented among the nation’s poor than its Chinese and Indian minorities.
Prime Minister Najib Razak has repeatedly emphasized that affirmative action would be made “market-friendly, merit-based, transparent and needs-based” under the country’s latest plan, the New Economic Model, which is designed to steer Malaysia toward its development goals. Ethnic Malays, or bumiputras, still benefit from privileges like discounted housing, and some government contracts are available only to companies they control.
A Malaysian Chinese businessman, who left Malaysia for Canada as a university student in the 1970s and stayed there, said that because of the policy, only a handful of his Malaysian Chinese classmates who also studied abroad had returned to Malaysia. Several other Malay and non-Malay interviewees also described the system as unfair.
Danny Quah, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, says that the brain drain has had a huge effect on the country’s economic and industrial development.