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AbstractForeign labour force participation in Sarawak is thirteen per cent (about 138,027) workers from Indonesia, Philippines, Myanmar, China and India, among others. This article attempts to describe the management of foreign labour employment in Sarawak. It also attempts to identify challenges and issues that current migration regulations have generated and which have impacted the society. Using the Filipino migrant workers as informants, a two‐year period of fieldwork observation was conducted, using personal interviews and observations following the 'mobile ethnography approach'. While Sarawak maintains its immigration control as part of the State safety net, the interplay between state and federal laws engenders contradictions that may be detrimental to the people and to society. This article argues that the claimed autonomous position of Sarawak in regard to immigration is not equated to better labour migration management in relation to the federal government's approach to labour migration in Malaysia.

AbstractLabour migration into Malaysia has increased rapidly in recent decades and this has affected Malaysia's government policy in managing migrants' movement. Interestingly, Malaysia has attracted a high degree of unskilled labour, accompanied by unabated rise of undocumented migrant workers. Mitigating undocumented migration is the main aim of Malaysia's labour migration policy and therefore the focus of Malaysian government. This has impacted on how enforcement agencies work out strategies. These agencies are the forefront of Malaysia's labour migration policy but they faced a number of challenges, such as documentation, finance and manpower capability, and political intervention, which impede their ability to optimize their capabilities in enforcing the Malaysian government labour migration policy. Resolving these challenges and moving towards a long‐term labour migration policy will benefit the Malaysian state, its citizens and the labour migrants.

International audience ; There have been growing interests in the rise of public GAP standards in Southeast Asia that have been implemented by the governments in the region. This paper investigates the local implementation of Malaysian public GAP standard called MyGAP by examining its effectiveness in raising the awareness and improving the land use practices of participant small-scale farmers toward better food safety and quality assurance. For this objective, 19 MyGAP certified and 57 uncertified durian farms in the state of Pahang, Malaysia were surveyed. The research found that while certified farm managers showed much better understanding of the basic intent of the policy than uncertified farms, their interests in and assessment of the merits from the scheme concentrate in economic realms rather than related to the original policy goal of food safety and quality assurance. As regards land use practices, certified farms showed much better performance than uncertified farms in record keeping and pesticide management. A set of circumstantial evidence seems to suggest, however, that certified farms' better pesticide management is more likely due to the certification screening of already-well-performing farmers than due to improved practices ex post facto. The observed significant discrepancy in the recent MyGAP adoption rates between durian in Pahang State and crop nationwide makes it difficult for us to determine the degree to which MyGAP's existing level of stringency in compliance led to such pre-screening determinism.