Welcoming others to join our "Sarawak My Second Home (SSMM2H)" program

Recently we organised a press conference in Kuching on the lat­est changes to the en­try re­quire­ments for the fed­eral's Malaysia My Sec­ond Home (MM2H) pro­gram which had made our Sarawak’s version even more at­trac­tive. I have mentioned to our media friends that Sarawak's ver­sion of the pro­gram is called SMM2H and it will not be af­fected by MM2H’s new re­quire­ments and reg­u­la­tions which will take ef­fect in Oc­to­ber this year.

I be­lieve this will be to Sarawak's ad­van­tage because our fed­eral coun­ter­part had re­cently amended the guide­lines and re­quire­ments for ap­pli­cants as well as for those who want to re­new their visa. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment on August 11 had an­nounced that MM2H will re­sume on­line with stricter cri­te­ria, such as an in­crease of com­pul­sory fixed de­posits in lo­cal banks to RM1 mil­lion; off­shore monthly in­come of RM40,000; and a dec­la­ra­tion of RM1.5 mil­lion in liq­uid as­sets. There is also a re­quire­ment of a min­i­mum stay pe­riod of 90 cu­mu­la­tive days per year as well as five years pass plus five years on re­newal ba­sis.

I have mentioned that if it were not due to the Covid19 pan­demic, there will be an avalanche of ap­pli­ca­tions for our pro­gram which has a panel that will in­de­pen­dently de­lib­er­ate and de­cide on each ap­pli­ca­tion. I am also the chairman for the panel which meet ev­ery month including with agen­cies like the Sarawak Im­mi­gra­tion De­part­ment, Chief Min­is­ter’s De­part­ment, Sarawak State At­tor­ney-Gen­eral’s Of­fice, Royal Malaysia Po­lice, state Health De­part­ment and fed­eral Tourism, Arts and Cul­ture Min­istry. 

It is interesting to note that from 2007 to 2020, we had re­ceived a to­tal of 1,306 par­tic­i­pants for this pro­gram and our min­istry has en­hanced new reg­u­la­tions and re­quire­ments for S-MM2H which came into ef­fect on September 1 last year. Ap­pli­cants from the United King­dom (UK) made about 18.1 per cent of ap­pli­ca­tions, fol­lowed by China (17 per cent), Tai­wan (12.3 per cent), Indonesia (7.1 per cent) and Sin­ga­pore (7 per cent).

In 2019 itself, there were many ap­pli­ca­tions from Aus­tralia, Bangladesh (14), United King­dom (25), China (45), Indonesia (17), Ja­pan (12), Korea (29) and Tai­wan (13). Due to Covid19 pan­demic, the ap­pli­ca­tions had markedly re­duced last year and there were only eight ap­pli­ca­tions from Aus­tralia, China (seven), Ire­land (six) and Sin­ga­pore (10).

Our min­istry had been study­ing why the ap­pli­ca­tions for the state pro­gram that had been quite low com­pared with that in Penin­sular Malaysia and among fac­tors that had been iden­ti­fied was bu­reau­cracy that led to ap­pli­cants not will­ing to come here.

I had also pointed our state government had never stopped of­fer­ing the S-MM2H pro­gram when the fed­eral pro­gram was tem­po­rar­ily sus­pended in June last year to al­low a more com­pre­hen­sive re­view and re-eval­u­a­tion of the pro­gram. Nonethe­less, the cri­te­ria for S-MM2H pro­gram in­cluded place­ment of fixed de­posits in lo­cal banks from RM150,000 for in­di­vid­u­als to RM300,000 for cou­ples.

There is also the re­quire­ment to in­vest in prop­er­ties specif­i­cally for res­i­den­tial pur­pose with at least RM600,000 ap­plies only to ap­pli­cants who are between 40-50 years of age while those who were above 30 years of age could also be con­sid­ered if they are ac­com­pa­ny­ing their chil­dren to study in Sarawak or seek­ing long-term med­i­cal treat­ment. There is the min­i­mum stay pe­riod of 15 days cu­mu­la­tive per year is re­quired and a 10 years pass will be is­sued to suc­cess­ful ap­pli­cants.

We will con­tinue to ac­tively di­ver­sify the tourism industry in Sarawak and be­yond leisure tourism by look­ing at the po­ten­tial of S-MM2H in bring­ing qual­ity vis­i­tors in order to support Sarawak’s Post Covid-19 Devel­op­ment Strat­egy (PCDS). 

Thus, the pro­mo­tion of high yield qual­ity tourism pro­gram like S-MM2H cer­tainly ben­e­fit the tourism sec­tor in Sarawak and we wel­come ex­pa­tri­ates as well as for­eign­ers to ap­ply for the S-MM2H Pro­gram. Once the Covid19 pan­demic sub­sides and the sit­u­a­tion sta­bilises, I be­lieve there will a sharp rise in ap­pli­ca­tions es­pe­cially with re­stric­tions on the fed­eral side and such situation may lead to an increase number of par­tic­i­pants com­ing into Sarawak for the pro­gram.