Migrant workers should be protected through integrated efforts

Around 10 million people of the country live abroad and contribute significantly to the economy through their remittances. Their earnings are crucial not only for their families in particular, but to the country as a whole.

However, the picture is not all rosy. It is unfortunate that a large section of the workers who go abroad from Bangladesh is unskilled and less educated. Scamsters take advantage of this and strip them of all their money, according to several private and government surveys.

According to a 2017 report of Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), 51 per cent of the aspirant Bangladeshi migrants fall victim to fraud and harassment. Among them, 19 per cent cannot go abroad at all while the remaining 32 per cent undergo all sorts of harassment after immigration.

Things have hardly improved. In fact, in recent times workers have returned from Malaysia and the Middle East after being cheated there, prove that such fraudulence has simply increased.

In the meantime, women workers are being lured to the Middle East. They live there in acute distress and many cannot even return alive. Such incidents are claimed as suicides but no clue remained as to actually what happened.

This is a serious problem and for the prime minister is also concerned. On Sunday, at a meeting of the national steering committee on migration, she asked the concerned authorities to ensure workers are not be cheated while going abroad.

These criminal rings must first be identified. There are laws in the country against such underhand activities and there are law enforcement agencies to implement these laws. Then how is it possible that the criminals spread their web across the whole country? It is not all that difficult to prevent them in such an age of information technology. The expatriate welfare ministry, Bangladesh missions abroad and the law enforcement must work together to end this.

Migration expert Tasneem Siddiqui said the recruitment agents are not the only ones to be blamed. The state must take responsibility too. It must find out where and how the people are being cheated and how to solve this. The percentage of people who are cheated and fail to go abroad must be decreased to zero from the existing 19 per cent.
No one can go abroad without the expatriate welfare ministry's clearance. It's not hard to assess whether they are going through legal or illegal agencies. The ministry must bell the cat. It's the law enforcement's turn then to detain them and put them on trial. The media is full of reports of such criminals being detained, but they soon slip out through loopholes in the law. This must be regulated strictly. If the culprits are punished without any delay, the middlemen's clout will diminish.