Political Conflict Over Immigration in Electoral-Authoritarian Malaysia

• In Event: Conflict and Division in the Public Opinion and Governance of Migration

Abstract

The relative openness of authoritarian countries towards immigration is an increasingly established finding: Authoritarian countries have been shown to have more open immigration policies and experience higher rates of immigration than democracies. The theoretical explanations offered by these studies mostly point to authoritarian regimes’ ability to manage immigration in such a way that they optimize their returns from it: Migrant workers constitute a low-wage work force that can be easily exploited and excluded from welfare benefits and primary labor markets. This view, however, gives insufficient attention to the internal policy dynamics in authoritarian countries which may exhibit considerable political conflict over immigration policy. It therefore also cannot account for policy shifts in these contexts. In this paper, I attempt to provide insights on political conflict over immigration policy in Malaysia in the years 2013 to 2018. During this period, the country is often classified as an electoral-authoritarian regime. It was governed by the same coalition, the Barisan Nasional, from independence in 1957 to 2018. Furthermore, some of the country’s core industries are heavily dependent on immigrant labor. Migrant workers, by most estimates, make up 20 to 30 per cent of the Malaysian workforce. Yet, the reliance on these workers is routinely criticized by politicians citing security concerns and worries that their availability reduces employers’ incentives to upgrade from labor-intensive production to more automated processes. Thus, the interests of stakeholders in this matter are contradictory. To explore this political conflict over immigration policy, I analyze a rarely-used source of data: Parliamentary questions in the country’s lower house, the Dewan Rakyat. Through these questions, members of parliament (MPs) can ask cabinet ministers about policy issues of their choice. Firstly, using a negative binomial regression model, I investigate which MPs ask critical questions on immigration policy most frequently. I find that belonging to the opposition and coming from states with high immigration rates is associated with higher numbers of questions. Secondly, I employ qualitative content analysis to examine the policies proposed by the ministers and the rationales they provide for these policies. Ministers, I find, do promote restrictive immigration policies, agreeing with MPs regarding the need to reduce the economy’s reliance on migrant workers. However, their proposals for reducing the rate of immigration are counteracted by a continued use of open immigration policies to accommodate employer demands. This paper adds to the growing literature on immigration policy in non-democratic contexts by pointing to legislatures as venues of political conflict over this issue.

Author

• Jakob Henninger