I'm not sure if that is anti-Malay so much as pro-Chinese.

An older friend told a story of a colleague he worked with in Vietnam who got married and tried to move back to Singapore. Multiple attempts to let his wife come along were rejected until he amended the paperwork to say she was Chinese ethnicity.

Might be a tall tale, but that's how it was told to me. I don't know the exact years in question though, it might have been a decade or more ago.