‘Nothing left for me’ as thousands of Bangladeshi workers lose everything in failed bid to work in Malaysia

The motorbike courier carrying Saiful’s ticket to the future screeched to a halt outside Dhaka’s Hazrat Shahjalal airport just an hour before his flight to Kuala Lumpur was due to take off.

Clutching his few possessions and necessary documents, Saiful and his family hurried to the departure hall.

“We are immensely relieved … Thanks to Allah, we secured his ticket at the last minute,” Saiful’s father told This Week In Asia, his voice thick with emotion as he embraced his son in a tearful, tight hug.

Saiful’s family paid nearly US$1,000, triple the standard airfare to Malaysia. They hope Saiful will find work in Malaysia’s migrant-labour dependent construction sector, with a promised monthly salary of 1,500 ringgit (US$320) – comparable to an entry-level white-collar job in Bangladesh.

However, in the chaotic days and hours leading up to the deadline, many others who had already paid similar prices to recruitment agencies could not secure a seat. Some were duped into buying counterfeit tickets, or abandoned by agents who had dangled false promises of being fast-tracked to the Malaysian job market.

“I sold everything to pay for this and now the agency has stopped picking up my calls,” said Abdur Rahman, a three-wheeler taxi driver from Bogra in northern Bangladesh, who mortgaged his family land and sold his vehicle, handing over 540,000 taka (US$4,600) to a recruitment agency in Dhaka.

“What will I do? There’s nothing left for me to do here.”

To get to Malaysia, Bangladeshis require a migrant worker visa issued by the Malaysian embassy in Dhaka. The government-set cost per worker is nearly 79,000 taka, as determined by an agreement between the two countries in 2021.

Malaysia set the May 31 deadline after the criminal market for