Noor Aziah Mohd Awal said the pandemic had forced many mothers to choose between giving birth to a stateless child overseas or returning to Malaysia but being separated from their spouses for months.
“The uncertainty for children born to Malaysian mothers married to foreign spouses is really alarming. It will have long-term effects on the children when they grow older,” Noor Aziah said at a webinar by the Foreign Spouses Support Group (FSSG), held in conjunction with World Children’s Day, today.
FSSG co-founder Bina Ramanand said focus groups had found that many children born to Malaysian mothers were being raised in hotel rooms overseas without access to vaccination or education, six months into the movement control order (MCO).
She said 205 mothers had reported that their spouses were stranded overseas in August, with 44 of them either pregnant or raising their newborns without their fathers.
Noor Aziah said that under the Federal Constitution, Malaysian women giving birth abroad cannot confer their nationality on their children.
As a result, she said, many mothers had returned to Malaysia alone during the pandemic to ensure that their children were granted citizenship.
Failure to do so would require them to go through a lengthy application process, with low approval rates.
“The government should simplify the permanent residence and approval process to prevent hardship and economic difficulties to foreign spouses,” she said.
She said foreign spouses had to enter Malaysia on long-term social visit passes, which prohibited them from seeking employment for up to a year.
She urged Putrajaya to remove its limitations on employment for foreigners as it could have a negative impact on the livelihood of families and prevent economic growth in the country.
Former deputy women, family and community development minister Hannah Yeoh said lack of cooperation from the home ministry had led to a backlog of citizenship applications last year.
She said the home ministry under Muhyiddin Yassin during the Pakatan Harapan (PH) administration had only agreed to streamline new applications, leaving about 40,000 existing applications still pending.
“With the current set-up in Parliament, I do not think we will be able to see a proposed amendment brought by the home ministry in the near future,” she said, adding that the issue would be brought up during the debate for the ministry’s budget in two weeks.
Dr Amar Singh, a paediatrician and child rights advocate, said separation would have long-term effects on the mental health of families.
“More children and families are constantly anxious and depressed. Now that it has dragged on for months with the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been no real resolution,” he said.
“Children become less hopeful for the future and this hopelessness is not good for a young child. I don’t think online communication of any sort can replace the physical presence of a parent to a child.”
Amar said non-citizen children would also be denied access to education at public schools and routine immunisation. This would effectively reduce the country’s herd immunity and expose people to more illnesses.