I fully agree with the Royal Address that national unity is the most important issue for our country. Whether the country has succeeded in forging greater unity among the diverse races, languages, religions and cultures in Malaysia should in fact be the primary yardstick in the assessment of the success or failure of half-a-century of nation-building and nationhood.
Fong Po Kuan, DAP MP for Batu Gajah, has a blog she named “Chamber of Thoughts”. Her latest entry is a three-part blog, “My Friend, An American Now”. It is a heart-rending story in the continuing creation of a Malaysian diaspora which has happened to more than a million Malaysians in the past four decades — whether to uproot and migrate overseas and later to take up foreign citizenship.
Although human migration is a common phenomenon in human history and prehistory, the migration of over a million Malaysians in the past four decades was more because of push rather than pull-factors, with the country losing many of her best talents and human resources stunting and undermining Malaysia’s achievement of her full potential in national development and international competitiveness.
Malaysia on her 50th anniversary would have been a more developed and more competitive nation if more than a million of the most talented , enterprising and resourceful Malaysians had not been driven away from our shores in the past four decades because of unfair discriminatory nation-building policies and measures by myopic politicians.
After nearly four decades of such self-inflicted injuries, the heart-rending story which Po Kuan blogs should have come to an end with the abandonment of unfair discriminatory policies among Malaysians.
But this is not the case. It would appear that the “Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish” reflex and mentality to the problem of emigration of Malaysians, though not publicly stated as in the seventies and eighties, is still quite prevalent today.
There is not much that can be done about the pull-factors of human migration but a government which refuses to address the problem of the push factors, which are the result of the failures of just and good governance, cannot claim to be a good government.
Po Kuan’s three-part blog should be a must reading for all MPs. Her blog, and my blog on Sunday which had drawn attention to the heart-rending account “My Friend, An American Now”, elicited many responses articulating the pain, agony and tribulation which had driven over a million talented, creative and enterprising Malaysians away from our shores only to benefit other countries.
In the March 2004 general election, the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi promised to lead a government which is prepared to hear the truth from the people. Parliament cannot do less to hear these genuine voices of Malaysians, for they represent not only the pain, agony and tribulation of over a million Malaysians who had been driven from our shores in the past four decades, but also tens of millions of Malaysians who had stayed behind.
The first to comment on my blog was “carboncopy” who wrote:
strong>My uncle left Malaysia in the 1960s. He graduated from MIT and did his PhD in Yale in Computer Science. I dare say, that was when Computer Science era was just starting. He was a very patriotic man, a King’s Scout, graduated from Royal Military College. He came back to Malaysia after his PhD to serve his country. Looked for a job in University Malaya. They told him point blank, we have openings, but its only for bumiputera. He left for greener pastures in United States. Have been a US citizens for a few decades now. He has contributed widely to the field of Computer Science and is still doing so. He never forgave Malaysia for turning their backs to him. And I guess he never will.
[Speech (2) on Royal Address debate in Parliament 21.3.07]