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Figure 5: Employed Persons by Occupation and Citizenship, 2017

946.7
Elementary occupations 908.6 (’000)
Plant and machine operators and assemblers 438.3
1,325.2
Craft and related trades workers 231.5 1,282.4
Skilled agricultural, forestry, livestock and fishery workers 84.8 812.2
Service and sales workers 407.9 2,798.2

Clerical support workers 20.2 1,214.6
Technicians and associate professionals 38.5 1,482.4

Professionals 43.6
1,725.5
Managers 24.0 665.5
0.0 1,000.0 2,000.0 3,000.0
Non Malaysian Citizen Malaysian Citizen

Source: Labour Force Survey Report 2017, Department of Statistics Malaysia

2.3 Foreign workers in other countries

11. International migration of workers is one of the key issues that policy makers have to
address in the Asia Pacific region. The United Nations estimated that there were 59.3 million
international migrants in the countries and areas of Asia and the Pacific in 2015.2 All
countries in the Asia Pacific have experienced the effects of both emigration and immigration
as well as the potential workers in transit migration. In this phenomena it is possible to
differentiate between mainly destination countries (e.g. Brunei, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore,
South Korea, Taiwan), countries with both significant immigration and emigration (e.g.
Malaysia and Thailand), and those that are mainly source countries (e.g. Bangladesh, Burma,
Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and
Vietnam).

12. In this UN report, the estimated total foreign migrant workers in Malaysia for 2015
totalled 2.5 million and made up 8.3% of the total population in Malaysia (Figure 5). The
equivalent comparable statistic for Singapore, showed international migrants constituted
42.9% of their population. Foreign migrant workers made up 38.9% and 27.7% of the
population of Hong Kong and Australia, respectively

Asia-Pacific Migration Report 2015, Migrants' Contributions to Development, ST/ESCAP/2738
2

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