Last week, the Department of Statistics Malaysia released the estimate for Malaysia’s population for 2017. As expected, Malaysia’s population growth continued to slow, with the population growth rate of citizens slowing to just 1.1%. Although Malaysia still has a young population, with 6.2% of her population aged 65 and above compared with 7.2% for middle income country, the aging process is going on at a fast pace. In 2000, the median age of Malaysia’s population was 23.6. This year, it is estimated at 28.3.

Meanwhile, the number of non-citizens grew 2.9% in 2017, though slower than the 3.3% increase in 2016, it was still considerably faster than that of citizens. In 2010, 8.2% of Malaysia’s population were non-citizens, today it was 10.4%. In other words, 1 out of 10 persons is a non-citizen. However, when it comes to employment, the ratio of Malaysian workers versus foreign workers is about 5:1. Such is the Malaysian economy’s high dependence on foreign workers.

Given that those are official numbers, the actual situation is likely to be even more severe. What is worse than the headline numbers is like what i Capital has written countless times that the majority of the foreign workers are of the low skilled, low wage type and an end to this situation is nowhere in sight.