They are voting with their feet (UPDATED with Chinese Translation)

ARCHIVES 2010

By MT Webmaster On Jun 16, 2010

So the government wants to address this problem by keeping Malaysian students at home in local universities. Would this solve the problem or would it just mean we would be churning our second-grade students? Are we addressing the brain drain by churning our brain dead students?

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

Nazri Aziz says that if Malaysia stops sending students overseas then this will reduce the brain drain that the country is suffering from. He proposes that to stop Malaysians from leaving the country we must not send them overseas for their education but instead educate them in local universities.

Well, read the various news reports below. Then you will see the real reason why the government is going to stop sending Malaysians overseas.

It is not really about the money, then, as they first said it is. After all, we are building a new palace and a new parliament building that is estimated to cost RM1.6 billion in total after spending about RM150 million to renovate these two buildings not that long ago. And, over the next five years, we are going to spend RM63 billion on 52 massive projects (see here: 10MP – Conspiracy of the Rich).

So it looks like we do have money to burn. It is just that we are not going to spend this money to educate our students in overseas universities. Instead, we are going to spend it on massive projects, which would most likely end up in the hands of crony-companies or negotiated without tender like what normally happens.

The government is worried that if Malaysian students are sent overseas they may get exposed to a better way of life and would open their eyes to how much better other countries are compared to Malaysia. And once they have celik (woken up or opened their eyes) they may not want to go home to Malaysia. And the news reports below not only show that this problem is real but that the government is very worried about it as well.

By ‘locking up’ the students in local universities and by not allowing them to see that the grass in greener on the other side the government hopes that this will reduce the brain drain. Maybe the government forgot that we are now living in the age of the information revolution and even though these students can’t physically be in another country they certainly are aware of what is going on beyond our shores.

It makes sense that it is more difficult for Malaysians to migrate when they have never left the country compared to if they have already been living in another country the last three or four years. It is a sort of mental thing. Since you never ‘tasted’ another country you will not long for it. So the government keeps the students at home to prevent them from developing a taste for another country.

Instead of ‘imprisoning’ the students at home to prevent them from ‘escaping’, the government should explore the reason why many Malaysians want to leave their country of birth and take their chances in another country. What can another country offer them that Malaysia can’t?

The number of Malaysians leaving for greener pastures is very high. And it is no longer just Chinese and Indians. Many Malays are leaving as well. In short, one million or so Malaysians have voted with their feet. And this is a vote of no confidence for Malaysia. What more can I say? The people have given up on their country. And they have shown this by voting with their feet.

You may say that one million Malaysians leaving is no big deal when two or three million foreigners have taken up Malaysian citizenship. True, one million leave and two to three million replace them. But these one million are quality one million. They are high-income earners and more than half possess a tertiary education, mostly from overseas universities. The two to three million ‘replacements’ are low-income labourers with no or very little education.

Also, don’t forget the cost to bring up and educate these Malaysians. From standard one up to university level, that is a total of about 15 or 16 years, it could cost up to a million to bring up and educate each Malaysian (what both the parents and government have to pay). Even if it were just up to form five or college level it would still come to a lot of money. And all this money would be ‘lost’ to another county that now gets these people for free and paid for by Malaysia.

Then these people earn good money in another country and pay local taxes. This money does not go back to Malaysia. So Malaysia, again, loses. The two to three million ‘new’ Malaysians, however, are from poor families so they do not spend their money locally — they do not even pay taxes — and they send this money home to support their poor families that depend on them.

Malaysia is losing billions in foreign exchange every month because of this.

So Malaysia does not really benefit from these foreigners now holding Malaysian papers because they do not contribute to the economy other than provide a source of cheap labour for jobs which Malaysians do not want anyway. Malaysians want better and higher-paying jobs, which they can get by leaving the country. And these high-paying jobs attract taxes, which overseas Malaysians pay to the country of their adoption.

Let us not forget, education is not just about academic results. It is also about how you are developed and taught how to rationalise. And the fact that Malaysia stifles students and prevents them from thinking lest they become anti-government means we are not allowing Malaysians the best education and the freedom to flourish.

Sure, we would get ‘compliant’ students, those who toe the line and do not become too ‘independent’. But this also means all we would get are robots who are unable to think for themselves and can only think what they have been programmed to think by their universities, BTN, and whatnot.

Finally, Malaysia is going to become a country with a true third-world mentality.

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Nazri says ending scholarships may stop brain drain

Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz has defended the government’s plans to redeploy bright students to study locally instead of overseas, arguing that this could prevent a further ‘brain-drain’ of talent.

“Sending overseas students causes brain-drain where some of them won’t want to come back after studying there for a few years.”

“If you keep sending students overseas, when are we going to improve our standards (locally)?” Nazri told The Malaysian Insider earlier this week.

He also believed that the money saved from the scrapping of the Public Service Department’s (PSD) overseas scholarships will be put to better use in ‘improving the facilities’ of local universities.

The Minister in the Prime Minister’s department said that if the federal government keeps sponsoring billions of ringgit for students to go abroad to study, local universities would never get to improve.

Nazri claimed that by channelling funds as well as the country’s brightest students within the confines of local universities, the “infrastructure” as well as quality of these institutions would gradually improve.

“We are concentrating on increasing the number of local universities, learning institutions at home. The money can be better off used to improve facilities here,” said Nazri. — The Malaysian Insider

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350,000 Malaysians are working abroad

Between 1960 and 2005, the world’s registered migration increased to an average of 919,302 per nation, an increase of 2.4 times. However, Malaysia’s emigration numbers rose to 1,489,168, an almost 100-fold increase over the 45-year period.

The recent report by the National Economic Advisory Council (NEAC) on the New Economic Model (NEM) laments that “we are not developing talent and what we do have are leaving”.

The report says that currently, some 350,000 Malaysians are working abroad with over half of them having tertiary education.

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/5/16/nation/6273783&sec=nation

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304,358 Malaysians reported to have migrated from March 2008 to August 2009

The number of Malaysians who surrendered their citizenship has almost doubled in this year, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Senator A. Kohilan Pillay, who revealed today that about 3,800 Malaysians have given up their citizenships to date compared to 2,000 last year.

This figure, however, is much smaller than the 304,358 Malaysians who were reported to have migrated from March 2008 to August 2009.

There was nevertheless a sharp rise in the number of Malaysians who registered themselves as having moved abroad with 210,000 of them doing so from January to August this year compared with 94,000 from March to December 2008.

http://jelas.info/2009/12/02/migration-of-malaysians-increasing-exponentially-whats-the-real-reason/

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Malaysians migrated: almost half a million since 2007

The Deputy Foreign Minister Senator A Kohilan Pillay announced in the Dewan Rakyat on November 30 that the number of Malaysian citizens who had migrated overseas from March 2008 to August the same year was 304,358. He said the figure from the same period in 2007 was 139,696.

It is quite normal for citizens of various countries to migrate elsewhere for various reasons. But the large numbers of Malaysians who have chosen to just uproot themselves and move to live and die in another country is really quite shocking.

Extrapolate these numbers to a long period of a few decades, and we can then begin to grasp the extent of this outward exodus of our citizens to countries like Australia, New Zealand, UK, USA, and Canada!

http://www.theborneopost.com/?p=3158

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Unofficially, a figure of 1 million talented Malaysians working overseas has been bandied about

So far, there is no concrete or official data to gauge the number of Malaysian professionals working overseas.

In a study done by Winters, et al (2007), which the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (Mosti) quoted last year during the Brain Gain Malaysia workshop organised by the United Nations Development Programme, it was estimated that in 2000, there were 785,000 Malaysians residing overseas, with about 40% of them being based in Singapore; 30% in member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and United Kingdom; 20% in other Asean countries including Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines, and 10% in other regions of the world.

Unofficially, a figure of 1 million talented Malaysians working overseas has been bandied about.

http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/2/6/business/5614304&sec=business

Translated into Chinese at: http://ccliew.blogspot.com/2010/06/blog-post_20.html