The Malaysian Population Including Illegal Foreigners

This is the official population of Malaysia given by JKJAV and the Ministry of Health:

Source: MOH Github Population

But of late, many states had exceeded 100% vaccination rates for adults.

Illegal foreigners are vaccinated too, but what is their population? The official population numbers given by the MOH above includes only Malaysian citizens and legal foreigners. If we don't know what is the population of illegal foreigners, using the official population numbers to calculate the percentage of vaccinated and unvaccinated people would be totally wrong. That is how CovidNow shows ridiculous numbers like 118% adults vaccinated. And of course, the resulting infection rates would also be wrong. (The rate of infection for the unvaccinated would look much higher than it really is.)

The Dept of Statistics' population data lists 30 million Malaysians and 2.7 million legal foreigners as Malaysian residents in 2021. This means that legal foreigners make up 8.25% of residents here.

Source: Department of Statistics Malaysia

But what is the population of illegal foreigners? The MOH recently published a database with data on vaccine recipients by nationality. So here we have an indirect census of the population of foreigners, legal and illegal in this country.

Below is the number of people who took the first dose of vaccine. There is data for all three doses but I used only the numbers for the first dose because by the 2nd and 3rd dose, many people have dropped out. Maybe they have returned to their home countries or died or simply did not want to take another dose. So the numbers for the first dose is the most accurate for representing the distribution of residents in the country.

Source: MOH Github Vax_Demog_Nationality

From here, we see that foreigners make up 13.71% of residents in Malaysia. That's a lot more than the 8.25% in the official population count. The difference is illegal foreigners who are not included in the census.

We can extrapolate this to the general population to calculate the number of illegal foreigners:

So, our country actually has 34.7 million residents, of which foreigners are 4.7 million, 43% of whom are illegal. That's 2 million more than the official numbers. Certainly the number of illegals is more than that, as I'm sure many dare not show up to be vaccinated. But I will just use the data that is available.

This new population number is the number I will be using for all my calculations from now on.

Thank you to Boo Koo for helping me with the research.

* * * * *

More graphs on Homepage.

Follow me on:
Facebook ☆ Telegram