COMMENT For the past 29 months, the home affairs minister has dragged migrant workers and employers in Malaysia through the shady and distressing rollercoaster of uncertainty and confusion that is the 6P programme.

What was meant to be a fairly straightforward exercise to register migrants, and create a pathway for them to either return home without penalties or seek legal status and continue working in Malaysia has resulted in nothing short of a festering mess of scams by agents, migrants swindled off thousands of ringgit, employers left without workers, and migrants either unable to become documented despite engaging in the processes by the state, or becoming undocumented as a result of it.