The relatively prosperous Southeast Asian nation relies heavily on men and women from Indonesia, Bangladesh, India and elsewhere to clean homes, construct buildings and gather crops.

But as one of Asia’s largest importers of labor, the government has become increasingly alarmed over the ramifications of having such a big foreign presence in a population of just 27 million.

Migrant workers have been accused of everything from depressing wages to causing crime waves. Plantation Industries Minister Peter Chin said recently they were “colonizing” Malaysia’s vast agricultural estates.

“People do tend to take the easy option because you have a large reservoir of foreign workers. They might even dump local workers in favor of foreign workers. And that’s not good for us,” said deputy prime minister Najib Razak.

“You’re attracting industries that depend on low wages. So we are reviewing that, we are reducing the number of foreign workers,” he told AFP in a recent interview.

The government has already announced a ban on foreigners working in “frontline” roles in hotels and airports, and now reportedly plans to cut the migrant workforce to 1.8 million by next year, and 1.5 million by 2015.

However, the campaign to reduce imported labor has been criticized as unplanned, disastrous for industries that depend on it, and insulting to the countries where the workers come from.

The deputy premier said Malaysia was in a “transition period” as it tried to shift from a low-wage model aimed at being competitive against regional neighbors, to a high-wage, knowledge-based economy.

Political commentators applaud the goal, but say there is no plan to carry out the transition which in any case would take a decade or more to achieve.

“Generally there has been very inconsistent migrant management in the country and now they’re trying to rein in all the excesses, and that appears to be very ad hoc as well,” said political economist Charles Santiago.

Santiago dismissed employers’ arguments that they can’t find enough Malaysians to fill their positions, saying that wages must be raised to make the jobs more attractive.

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