KL extends deadline

A total of 30,000 Bangladeshi workers, who failed to legalise their visa status under an amnesty offered by Malaysian government, will get another chance as the deadline has been extended till January 21 next year.
“Bangladeshi workers, who were deceived by agents, brokers, or their owners, and had reported to Malaysian police during the period between September 1, 2011 and September 10, 2013, will be able to legalise their visa status, ” said Expatriates' Welfare and Overseas Employment Minister Khandker Mosharraf Hossain yesterday.
The Malaysian government declared the amnesty programme in 2011.
A total of 2,67,803 out of around three lakh illegal Bangladeshis had registered for legalising their status under the amnesty, he said at a press conference in the ministry.
Of them, only 2,04,000 had been legalised, he said, adding that the rest had failed to take the advantage.
Some of them had returned home afterwards.
The remaining workers now have to take help from their present employers or visit Malaysian home ministry's one-stop service centre supervised by Bangladesh high commission in Kuala Lumpur to begin the legalisation process, the minister said.
Warning the Bangladeshis not to take any help from agents or middlemen, he said they would have to submit their registration or finger print (PATI) receipts, original passports and police reports to the one-stop service centre authorities.
Replying to the queries of the reporters, Khandker Mosharraf blamed the Malaysian employers for not recruiting Bangladeshis under a memorandum of understanding signed between Dhaka and Kuala Lumpur last year.
“The Malaysian employers assured us of hiring minimum 10,000 Bangladeshis by this year, but they could not create enough jobs,” he said, adding that the process was taking time.
In reply to another query, the minister said there were around 400 Bangladeshis who had been languishing in the jails of Malaysia and Saudi Arabia for committing different crimes in the host countries.
The Bangladesh government was trying to bring them back through legal process, he added.
In spite of security hazards, some Bangladeshis are regularly migrating to Iraq and Libya. The minister said the government could not stop them from migrating to those countries thinking of losing the labour markets.
More than 2.3 million Bangladeshis had migrated to different countries for foreign jobs during the tenure of the incumbent government whereas the figure stood at 1.3 million during the tenure of BNP-Jamaat government, he said, drawing a comparison.