KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 20 — Poverty-hit migrant workers worldwide are swooping in on Malaysia, lured by the Southeast Asian nation’s fast-growing economy that provides a steady source of jobs and salaries to help feed their families back home, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has reported.

Malaysia’s growth has spawned a labour shortage in its plantations and on its factory assembly lines, particularly in its still-thriving electronics industry, that are increasingly shunned by locals and is being filled by workers from Bangladesh, India and Vietnam looking for stable employment and incomes they no longer see available in the US.

“People who would think ‘only US’ now prefer the option of working in a country that is easier to reach and to enter,” Odilon Almeida, president for the Americas region at Western Union, the world’s largest money-transfer firm, was quoted as saying.

Almeida noted that regional hubs were popping up worldwide drawing migrant workers seeking a more reliable source of income than the US, to shift eastwards and southwards to countries like Malaysia, Brazil and Chile.

Among the reasons for its growing popularity is the perception that Malaysia, like other commodities suppliers to China and India, will be able to absorb any economic slowdown in the two Asian giants.

“[You] would need a full-blown implosion of China and India for a reversal in this new remittance pattern,” the international business news magazine quoted University of California economist Gordon Hanson, as saying.

Hanson, who studies remittances and migration, was also reported saying that migrant workers are developing a support immigrant network in their host countries.

“More countries are recognising they need migrants for their long-term economic well-being,” Scott Scheirman, Western Union’s chief financial officer told WSJ, adding that the company has been seeing double-digit annual growth in Malaysia in recent years.

Western Union was responsible for moving US$79 billion (RM251.6 billion) in cash transfers last year, and saw less than 30 per cent of that amount flowing out of the US, which had been the company’s mainstay a decade ago, the WSJ reported.

Citing data from the World Bank, the WSJ reported that migrant workers sent home US$518 billion (RM1.65 trillion) in remittances last year, nearly 3 per cent more than in 2011.

Cash transfers by Malaysia’s foreign workers to their home countries doubled to RM20 billion last year from RM10 billion in 2009, Parliament was told last week.

The top five countries that received remittances from Malaysia in 2012 are Bangladesh (RM3 billion), Indonesia (RM3 billion), Nepal (RM2 billion), India (RM625 million) and the Philippines (RM561 million).

Remittances between countries are also seen as among the few reliable sources of where immigrants are working as many workers may have entered the country illegally, and a stable source of foreign exchange than foreign investments pumped directly into those developing economies.

Malaysia has registered 2.1 million foreign workers while an estimated 1.3 million foreigners are working here illegally, Deputy Human Resource Minister Datuk Ismail Abd Muttalib was reported saying in July.

The WSJ reported yesterday that the World Bank forecasts cash transfers, which it noted is crucial to cut poverty, will reach almost US$550 billion this year.

It highlighted that the amount represents three times the size of foreign aid to developing nations.