Immigration: No Way To Work; The plight of Asia's migrant workers is a growing scandal.

Byline: George Wehrfritz and Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop (With Jonathan Adams in Taipei and B. J. Lee in Seoul)

Kumar has little to show for his three and a half years mixing concrete at Singapore construction sites, without a single day off. After rent, food and a small remittance to support his family back home in India, he has just enough to repay the agent who found him his job, for a fee of $5,400. Once he blew out his knee in a work accident, Kumar could no longer do his assigned job. So he is legally required to go back to India, where he'll need to pay another broker in order to return to Singapore. "We don't have any savings," he says. "Nothing has really changed."

Kumar's frustration is a distant strain of the social unrest that exploded last month in France, where the children of new immigrants, most from Africa, launched an arson campaign to protest their plight at society's margins. Countries in Southeast Asia have faced some of the same labor shortages that compelled France, Germany and Britain to welcome immigrants willing to take factory jobs beginning in the 1970s. And unlike behemoth China, with its huge pool of workers, they've had to look abroad for solutions. The problem is that these schemes are in danger of making "temporary" foreign workers a permanent new underclass.

Increasingly, Asia's newly industrialized nations--South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore--rely on immigrants like Kumar to build skyscrapers, sweep streets and clean toilets. Their largest expatriate populations today are Chinese, Thai, Filipino and Indonesian. In Taiwan, the official foreign-worker population has grown from 16,000 in 1992 to 300,000 this year. But unlike in Europe--where millions of guest workers have attained citizenship in recent decades--none of the Asian states gives immigrant labor an option to stay legally. "None of the Asian countries have ever been immigrant societies," says Lin Lean Lim, deputy director of the International Labor Organization's regional headquarters in Bangkok. "But their own societies have growing labor shortages, so the management of labor migration is of increasing concern."

That entails a byzantine system of bogus training programs, shady employment agencies, confusing regulations and double standards. In Hong Kong, maids from the Philippines and Indonesia can't apply for permanent residency as might, say, a plumber from Poland. In South Korea, foreign workers are limited to a total of three two-year stints.

The aim of these ...