Illegal immigrants in Malaysia

In its broadest sense within the Malaysian context, illegal immigration to Malaysia refers to the cross-border movement of people to reside in Malaysia, under conditions where official authorisation is lacking, breached, expired, fraudulent, or irregular in some way. The cross-border movement of workers has become a well-established feature of Southeast Asia, with Malaysia one of the major labour receiving countries, and Indonesia and the Philippines the region’s main labour sending states. At the same time, managing all the various forms of cross-border migration (particularly labour migration, refugee migration, and human trafficking) has become an issue of increasing concern, both within Malaysia and in its international relations.

In recent years the designation "illegal", when applied to "migration" and "migrant", has been increasingly replaced - most often by the terms “irregular” and "undocumented" - on the grounds that the designation "illegal" is inaccurate, degrading, and prejudicial. Key institutions have formally adopted the new terms: UN General Assembly (1975), International Labour Organization (2004), European Parliament (2009), Associated Press (2013), and other US news agencies.

But these new terms are rarely used in official and academic discourses in Malaysia, as the popular term used is “illegal immigrant”. Even the controversial term "illegals", that elsewhere has been perceived as outdated and pejorative, is regularly used in Malaysia's media.

Terminology is also obscured because of law in Malaysia (Immigration Act 1959/63), where there is no distinction between undocumented economic migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, or trafficked persons, with members of all groups designated as illegal immigrants.

So, within the Malaysian context, the term "illegal immigrant" (used in its broadest sense) designates a wide variety of groups, who are all liable to arrest, charge, whipping, detention and deportation for Immigration offences:

The patterns of migration, as well as the roles and responses of governments in the region with regard to migration, have deep roots in the region's history. The area now known as Malaysia has historically been the crossroads of a region of intense migration, where borders were either lacking or highly permeable.

For most of human history people were free to move between regions. Malaysia's first generation of migrants consisted of indigenous peoples, the Orang Asli, believed either to have been among the first wave of human migration from Africa around 50,000 years ago, or to belong to the more recent events of Asian human evolution.

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Wikipedia