Raisha Jesmin Rafa
Poor, low-skilled Bangladeshi men and women represent a majority of the laborers migrating to the Gulf region for transitory work. The Bangladesh Bureau of Manpower, Employment & Training (BMET) reports that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), encompassing Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, accommodates millions of Bangladeshi labor migrants annually (BMET, 2023a). Bangladesh’s developmental vision champions the role of migrant workers, placing on them the duty of earning foreign currency to nourish the country’s socioeconomic health and national status; migrant remittances contribute well over 6% of Bangladesh’s annual GDP, making it one of the top recipients of remittance flows in the world (Mahmud, 2023:56; The World Bank, 2023). The economic gains, however, mask the deeper structural inequities and power hierarchies forming the substratum of migration. Caught between intricate class, gender, and racial hierarchies, Bangladeshi migrants come to confront multiple challenges throughout the migration lifecycle.
Gender pervades every step of the migration process in Bangladesh, from the recruitment process to the flow of remittances. Prevailing gender norms dictate men’s and women’s migration opportunities, processes, and experiences, creating gender-differentiated impacts. Gender, however, does not operate in a silo and intersects with class and race, revealing the interrelatedness of multiple axes of oppression that can influence the migration ecosystem. These interlinked themes animate this paper as I move beyond the economic dimensions of labor migration to contend that the motivations and experiences of poor, low-skilled Bangladeshi migrants are shaped by their embeddedness in complex power hierarchies linked to class, gender, and race.
No comments:
Post a Comment