Foreign Workers to Entrepreneurs: A Framework of Job Displacement
The entry of foreign workers on a large scale to Malaysia in the 1980s was mainly to smooth and facilitate thedevelopment of economic structural change as unskilled labor in the formal sector. It is expected that in theprocess of adjusting to economic changes, there is a shift of employment of foreign workers, especially during aneconomic crisis in 1997 and 2008. The main objective of this study was to establish a hypothetical model of jobdisplacement of unskilled foreign labor to entrepreneurs. Data was gathered through a survey on foreignbusinessmen who once worked as laborers in Malaysia. Descriptive analysis results show that most migrantworkers were able to shift into entrepreneurs due to the high desire to try his luck and take advantage of a stableeconomic situation. Furthermore, those migrants are more likely to become entrepreneurs in the same businesssector of the field when first engaged as unskilled workers. Among the driving factors that contributed to the jobdisplacement includes working experience, the existence of opportunity and fellow encouragement.