Modern slave nations: Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan, North Korea, Eritrea, and…. Malaysia
That’s where we stand on the human rights scale. That’s the company we share, the countries we are setaraf (comparable) with.
And on what issue exactly? Nothing less than human trafficking and forced labour – modern slavery.
Having worked a long time ago with an NGO that dealt with these issues, I want to say that this is no American imperialist exaggeration. There are hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants in Sabah *alone*. Imagine what the numbers are nationwide.
I have seen some of the squalor migrants have lived in, I have heard the horror stories of how they came to Malaysia, and the stories of how they are shipped back and forth across the border so that some corrupt officials can make a killing.
Many of us like to blame migrants for social ills and crimes, always talking about what they are doing to us. Notwithstanding that this view is statistically incorrect, do we stop to think about what we do to them?
Maybe if we stopped being slave traders and started treating migrants right, both their and our problems are solved.
