COMMENT | Migrant labor is quite a difficult problem to solve because of corruption, patronage, abuse, etc. at every stage of the process involving ministers and senior politicians, government officials at every level and enforcement agencies.

It’s a huge mess without a solution unless the Madani government is prepared to pull it out from the roots, face all the related issues and bring hundreds of people involved to account.

The eventual losers are the migrant workers who are left in the lurch by unions even after paying huge sums to get here, and the employers who will have to pay unnecessarily high sums to get migrant workers.

Malaysiakini’s latest exposé talks about unions getting quotas for importing foreign workers but not needing them. They sell those shares to those who need them, pocketing millions of ringgit for nothing.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Others get thousands of ringgit per worker to get them a job, and others (sometimes the same people or companies) get thousands from employers for each worker.