In The News – Marriages of Inconvenience

Here’s some news that’ll be of interest to anybody with a foreign spouse. Okay, I’ll admit I’m doing this because I got tired of yelling at the papers this morning and need to vent. Consider yourself warned.

The New Straits Times’ front page is devoted to a story about a so-called “visa loophole” that allows prostitution syndicates to bring in Thai, Chinese and Vietnamese women to Malaysia by “marrying” them to Malaysian men.

With these “marriages,” the women get a five-year social pass and the “husbands” get between RM3,000 and RM5,000 as well as a monthly allowance of RM500 to RM2,000 for their troubles.

In one particularly memorable paragraph, the paper describes one couple – 70-year-old man, 21-year-old woman – gazing lovingly at each other at the National Registration Dept. He strokes her hair; she strokes his urine bag. Once they leave the building, he gets paid and it’s Bye Bye Suzie.

Please, the NRD and immigration officials beseech, get rid of these 5-year social passes for wives and husbands of Malaysians.

Whaaaaaa???

Please, they plead, let’s go back to the pre-2010 system where foreign spouses of locals have to renew their visas every month for a year, then every year for about 10 years. And then they can apply for PR status.

I hope you’re hyperventilating by now. I am.

So we have to penalise the innocent to catch the guilty? I’m sure all of you know of poor foreign spouses who’ve had to go through the yearly immigration torture because they had the misfortune to fall in love with a Malaysian.

But wait! Page 10 of the NST has a helpful photograph of the 2010 circular to the Immigration department (“which officers blame for the headache,” the caption says) sent by Pemudah, a task force set up to cut government red tape.

It does indeed instruct immigration to issue long-term social passes to spouses of Malaysians. But the next paragraph is interesting:

“Pemberian kemudahan juga adalah tertakluk kepada Peraturan-peraturan Imigresen yang akan diberikan oleh Unit Naziran bagi memastikan tidak berlakunya ‘Marriage of Convenience.'”

So those in marriages of convenience should have their applications rejected!

Yet the article goes on to describe exasperated immigration officers pointing out members of vice syndicates handing over cash outside the NRD, as if they were “thumbing their noses at the authorities, mocking and taunting them.” Their hands, they say, are tied. They must, they say, approve the visas anyway.

I’d say the rules are quite clear: Give the 5-year social passes to real spouses. Don’t give them to fake ones.

What’s the problem? Why didn’t the reporter ask the NRD and immigration this very basic question?

Gargh.

NST story here.