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Pakistanis in Malaysia form the largest Pakistani diaspora community in southeast Asia and the tenth-largest in Asia as a whole.
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Population
The actual number of Pakistani people in Malaysia is generally understated, as the figure provided by the Pakistani Ministry of Labour merely assert that those who hold Pakistani citizenship. An absolute number of Pakistanis people and their descendants are likely to exceed 100,000. This is heavily contributed because the early settlers came from pre-partitioned British India (which located in present-day Pakistan) during the colonial days have obtained Malaysian citizenship. Throughout the years, most of Pakistanis Malaysians and their descendants are partially and fully assimilated with the Malay majority due to their common Islamic background, high level of intermarriage and to receive the lavish aid of Malaysian affirmative action policy under Article 153, thus registered themselves as Malays. Nonetheless, they identified their roots as Pakistani. A vast majority of Pakistanis can be considered as having Central Asian racial ancestry, given their close roots to the Indo-Iranian people groups of the region. The primary languages spoken by Pakistanis in Malaysia are Urdu, an Indo-Iranian language with considerable mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic words as well as Malay.
Employment
Figures from Pakistan's Ministry of Labour, Manpower, and Overseas Pakistanis show 10,000 Pakistanis working in Malaysia. A few sources have claimed many as 15,000 to 30,000 at various times. Under a 2005 agreement between Pakistan and Malaysia, as many as 100,000 Pakistanis may eventually work in Malaysia, especially in the manufacturing, construction, and plantation sectors; the Pakistani workers are intended to replace nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants from Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka who departed the country under an amnesty which ended in March 2005. Lt. General Tahir Mahmud Qazi, Pakistan's High Commissioner to Malaysia, expected that the number of Pakistanis in Malaysia would reach that figure of 100,000 by the end of 2010.
Pakistanis in Malaysia often live in miserable conditions; after an inspection tour, Pakistani senators Fauzia Fakhru Zaman and Rukhsana Zuberi said they had seen many workers who were weak due to lack of proper food and begged to be taken home, while others were receiving only RM400 in monthly salary after having been promised nearly four times that much by recruiters. The senators also blasted the Pakistani High Commission in Malaysia for taking no action on behalf of Pakistani workers there and for overcharging them for land purchases in Pakistan under the OPF Housing Scheme.
Travel
In addition to the 10,000 Pakistanis working in Malaysia, the country receives as many as 50,000 visitors from Pakistan each year; Pakistan's Airblue plans to launch direct flights to Kuala Lumpur in 2009 and ordered fourteen Airbus A320 planes to service the route.
Notable people
Almost all figures in the list of the notable people Pakistani descent in Malaysia are of mixed descent, particularly with the ethnic Malays. Mixed-marriage is a pattern which is shared with most of Pakistani descent in Malaysia (excluding to the recently arrived migrants), after settling in the Malaysian soil after generations, assimilation process and the common Islamic background.