Brendon Beliku is a corporate immigration and employment compliance professional based in Kota Kinabalu. He writes independently on Sabah’s economic governance, labour policy, regulatory affairs and Momogun empowerment.
KOTA KINABALU: BIMP-EAGA leaders adopted Vision 2035 at a special summit in Cebu on 7 May 2026, setting the sub-region’s direction for the next decade.
The roadmap commits to 265 priority infrastructure projects worth an estimated USD174.6 billion, up from 57 projects when the initiative began in 2015.
It is built around four strategic outcomes: climate smart agro-industry and fisheries, seamless travel and sustainable tourism, a network of production hubs that strengthens competitiveness and an “agile and future ready workforce”.
Read closely, that fourth pillar promises the people. Nothing in the other three explains how those people are actually meant to cross the borders the production hubs sit across.
-What the Workforce Pillar Actually Commits To-
The agile workforce outcome, as described by Mindanao Development Authority chairperson Leo Tereso Magno following the summit, is framed around human resource development and TVET transformation, preparing a workforce for Industry 4.0, and for the digital, green and blue economy skills BIMP-EAGA wants its production hubs to run on.
That is a training and skills commitment. It is not a labour mobility commitment. Nowhere in the publicly stated four pillars does Vision 2035 address how a skilled worker trained under this framework in one BIMP-EAGA jurisdiction is meant to move and work in another.
The seamless travel pillar is the closest the roadmap comes to a mobility commitment and it does not close that gap either.
As described across BIMP-EAGA’s own materials, seamless travel is oriented toward tourism, unifying border systems for easier visitor movement and supporting sustainable tourism destinations across Mindanao, Palawan and the wider sub-region.
A tourist crossing a border and a sponsored specialist being deployed to work at a production hub are subject to entirely different regulatory regimes, and a pillar built around the former says nothing about the latter.
This gap is not hypothetical or unique to Sabah’s own arrangements. As recently as this month, Sarawak’s Transport Ministry and the Malaysia Productivity Corporation launched a Cross Border Operational Guidebook for Sarawak-Brunei-Sabah Transportation Efficiency, aimed specifically at the movement of goods and passengers across Borneo.
That initiative, real and current, demonstrates that BIMP-EAGA’s Malaysian states are actively building cross border connectivity infrastructure right now.
It is also, by its own stated scope, about transport efficiency for goods and passengers, not about the regulatory pathway a foreign specialist needs to actually take up a role on the other side of a border.
-Sabah’s Dual Track System as the Live Example-
Sabah is where this gap becomes concrete rather than theoretical, because Sabah already runs the kind of dual track immigration system that any future BIMP-EAGA labour mobility framework would eventually have to reconcile with. Sabah retains its own constitutional authority over immigration and labour matters under the Malaysia Agreement 1963, operating a separate Sabah Work Pass system alongside the federal Employment Pass framework.
A specialist already holding federal approval elsewhere in Malaysia cannot simply be redeployed to a Sabah production hub on the strength of that approval.
The federal pass must be cancelled first before a Sabah Work Pass application can even be submitted, a sequential requirement rather than an additional layer running in parallel. Where local hiring priority applies, it must be demonstrated separately before any foreign specialist application proceeds.
None of this makes Sabah’s system wrong or an obstacle invented for this argument. It reflects a genuine constitutional settlement that predates BIMP-EAGA by decades and serves purposes entirely independent of regional integration.
But it is precisely the kind of structural friction Vision 2035’s agile workforce pillar has not yet had to confront, because that pillar currently stops at training people rather than addressing “how trained people move”.
A BIMP-EAGA production hub sited in Sabah, and the vision explicitly anchors production hub competitiveness as one of its four outcomes, will eventually need specialists who trained under the workforce pillar in Kalimantan, Mindanao or Brunei to actually be deployable in Sabah.
The mechanism for that deployment is not a BIMP-EAGA instrument. It is Sabah’s own federal-state immigration structure, built for entirely domestic purposes, now sitting underneath a regional ambition it was never designed to serve.
-Naming the Gap Before It Becomes a Bottleneck-
This is not an argument for weakening Sabah’s constitutional position on immigration and labour, and nothing about MA63 needs to change for BIMP-EAGA’s workforce ambitions to succeed.
It is an argument for naming the gap honestly while the sub-region is still in the early years of a ten year roadmap. Vision 2035 has committed member states to training an agile workforce and building production hubs for it to staff. It has not yet committed to a framework addressing how that workforce actually crosses the borders those hubs sit across, and Sabah’s dual track system, entirely reasonable on its own domestic terms, is the clearest illustration available of why that omission will eventually need an answer.
[Disclaimer]: The views, opinions and analyses expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies or positions of the Jesselton Times, its editors, management or affiliated entities. This article is published for analytical and public discussion purposes and should not be construed as institutional commentary or endorsement.
