Abstract
We provide a quantitative diagnostic of attempts by Bangladeshi workers at migrating to foreign countries and the risks that they face in doing so. We show that migration failures may be as high as one-third of attempts at migrating, with large financial losses for households with an aspiring migrant. Using a duration model, we find that success in migrating is associated with a current higher national migration, larger village migration network, and urban residence. We also find that in spite of the high cost of failure, there are still large expected gains from trying to migrate.
The Challenge of Migration
International migration plays an important role for the economy of Bangladesh. In 2015, remittances accounted for more than US$14 billion, about 7.4 percent of GDP. 1 This dwarfs the US$3 billion in foreign aid and the US$2.2 billion in foreign direct investment the country received that year. 2 In the generation of foreign exchange, remittances come only second to garment exports that reached US$20 billion in fiscal year 2014–2015. 3 With an increasing migration rate, remittances are expected to play an even more prominent role in Bangladesh’s future. While women constitute the majority of workers in the garment sector, men dominate migration (IOM 2010; Rahman and Siddiqui 2015). Around 10 percent of the national male labor force in Bangladesh is migrants, with some 600,000 new migrants departing each year. 4 Most migrants are poor, rural, and low-skilled individuals who work on short-term contracts, mainly in the Persian Gulf, Malaysia, Singapore, Lebanon, and Jordan. 5 Migration has become a major lifeblood to Bangladesh’s economy. Making sure that willing and able candidates effectively succeed in migrating is thus an important national policy issue.
At the individual level, international migration’s impact has been substantial as well. In spite of a remarkably rapid decline in the fertility rate (Paul 1997), Bangladesh still has a large labor force growth rate 6 and extensive surplus labor, especially among young unskilled male workers. For them, in spite of costs and risks, migration offers a unique opportunity to escape unemployment and poverty. When successful, it has been an avenue for poverty reduction for rural households (Afsar, Yunus, and Islam 2002; Raihan et al. 2009; Sharma and Zaman 2009). 7 In the 2009 Bangladesh Household Remittance Survey (BHRS) (IOM 2010), the most comprehensive source of information on migrants so far, migrant households were found to be earning annually twice as much as the average resident household in Bangladesh. Since migrants usually get short-term contracts, there is a general concern that accrued benefits might only be temporary. 8 However, our data, which we discuss in the following, show that individuals who have successfully migrated once manage to remigrate with relative ease. They can also extend their stay by renewing their contracts for subsequent terms by agreement between employer and employee (Islam 2015). 9 Successful migrants are therefore likely to reap benefits for extended periods of time, with lasting impacts on the income and welfare of households. In the BHRS, 70 percent of respondents expressed confidence in sustaining their increases in income through the skills learned and assets acquired in migrating, and 88 percent of households with migrants reported enhanced educational opportunities for their children, resulting in permanent investment in human capital. This is for successful migrants. The other side of the coin, however, vastly ignored and undocumented, is the large rate of migration failure that leaves poor potential migrants generally worse off after having invested in migration and failed to either leave the country or find a job at destination. Migration thus appears as a risky enterprise with potentially large negative effects for many.
Newspapers in Bangladesh extensively report on the plight of prospective migrants, exposing malpractice by dishonest middlemen, issuance of fake visas, arbitrary visa cancellations in the host country, and failure to find the expected job at destination (IOM 2002). Fraudulent agents appear to be particularly active in the migration business, where they deal with a poor and ill-informed clientele, especially in rural areas. Systematic evidence on the issue remains, however, scarce. Purvez and Karim (2009) conducted a pioneering study of migration from Bangladesh, pointing out the scope of migration failures and identifying the sources of failure. Their database, though, was very limited and the reported information more in the nature of case studies. Our study attempts to fill the gap by providing a quantitative description of migration failure in Bangladesh. Through a unique data collection strategy using high-frequency recalls to characterize attempts at migration (with both successes and failures) and migration itself (including early returns that indicate migration failures), we provide a diagnostic assessment of the extent of migration failure, its cost on failing households, and its proximate, noncausal determinants.
There is an important literature showing the role of risk of failure in holding back migration, both domestically and internationally. Bryan, Chowdhury, and Mobarak (2014) used a randomized control trial in Bangladesh to show that a small cash incentive to rural households close to subsistence can induce a large response in seasonal rural-urban domestic migration, with high rewards for the household. They attribute this effect to the fact that the risk of not matching to an employer at destination was holding back the very poor from migrating. Risk reduction by subsidizing migration’s cost can thus help poor households take advantage of migration’s benefits. Much attention has also been given in the literature to the role of social networks in facilitating migration (Massey and Garcia-España 1987; McKenzie and Rapoport 2010). Social networks have many facilitating functions, including that of reducing the risk of migration failures, in particular through the provision of information on how to migrate and find a job at destination (Dolfin and Genicot 2010). Finally, several studies have emphasized the high chance of failure after having migrated, including the risk of falling victim to human trafficking and forced labor (UNODC 2011; Harroff-Tavel and Nasri 2013). In our study, we characterize migration failure after departure by the migrant’s return less than six months after the departure date. We show, however, that the incidence of migration failure after departure is less important than failure before departure but after funds have been spent in attempting to migrate.
Using high-intensity recall data collected across 496 villages in Bangladesh, our analysis suggests that a significant proportion of new migration attempts end in failure. A conservative estimate from our village census data suggests that 28 percent of attempts at migrating are unsuccessful. A broader definition of failed migration, however, indicates that the rate can be as high as 34 percent. These failures impose a huge cost on the households of failed migrants, with a median loss of US$250. This is approximately 24 percent of annual earnings for an average Bangladeshi household and clearly much more for a poor rural household with median annual earning of US$109. Furthermore, evidence indicates that failure discourages potential migrants from trying to migrate again. We argue that at the aggregate level, total migration is constrained by the number of available jobs for Bangladeshis in the destination countries, partly established by agreements signed between governments. Hence, as the number of aspiring migrants steadily rises, the countrywide failure rate reflects the demand constraint. At the individual level, who fails among applicants is strongly correlated with how knowledgeable and experienced with the migration process an applicant is. At that level, the main correlates of success are the size of the community migration network and an urban residence, while attempting to migrate through relatives does not significantly correlate with success. Finally, we show that earnings abroad for successful migrants are a multiple of earnings on the domestic labor market. As a consequence, in spite of the high risk of failure and associated costs, attempts at migrating remain a powerful attraction.
In what follows, we provide a brief review of the migration process and then present the data used. Next, we give an estimation of the extent of migration failure, followed by the cost of failure. We then use econometric analysis to identify the correlates of both failure and success in migration, followed by asking whether the cost of failure may deter future migration. The final section concludes with policy recommendations to help candidates to migration achieve a higher rate of success.
The Migration Process
Significant emigration out of Bangladesh started in the early 1980s and grew steadily to reach 200,000 to 220,000 migrants per year in 2006, for a total population of almost 150 million (Figure 1). Since then, it has dramatically increased, reaching almost 900,000 in 2008 and passing the one million mark in 2017. Yet as seen in Figure 1, the migrant flow has been extremely erratic over the past 10 years. These fluctuations are largely driven by the demand for labor in destination countries and the nature of bilateral relations between Bangladesh and those countries. Significant restrictions on Bangladeshi migrant workers were imposed during this period by countries such as Kuwait, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia. Restrictions from Saudi Arabia reduced the flow of Bangladeshi migrants from more than 200,000 in 2007 to 132,000 in 2008 and only 10,000 in 2009 before picking up again to reach 60,000 in 2016 and 140,000 in 2017 (Figure 1). 10
Migration trends of Bangladesh.
The Bangladeshi government’s institution that regulates and supervises migration is the Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET). Established in 1976 as a department attached to the then Ministry of Manpower Development and Social Welfare, it is now under the Ministry of Expatriate Welfare and Overseas Employment. BMET issues licenses to the recruitment agencies that operate in Bangladesh, giving them authorization to recruit migrants and providing emigration clearance after verifying visas and employment contracts (Rahman 2012). It also organizes training sessions for aspiring migrants, keeps track of migrants who depart with their clearance, and maintains a database that includes information on aspiring migrants (ILO 2015). 11
The actual recruitment of migrants is done through public agencies, social networks, and private recruitment agencies (Rahman 2012). 12 The government participates in recruitment through two small-scale initiatives. One is the Bangladesh Overseas Employment and Services Ltd. (BOESL), which has been operating since 1984 and caters mainly to high-skilled workers and professionals (Siddiqui, Rashid, and Zeitlyn 2008). The other is a lottery system for selecting migrants to Malaysia. Social network migration comes in the form of an individual aspiring migrant obtaining a job and a visa through a migrant living abroad and to which he or she is connected. Migration through these individual relationships is cumulative in that the more people from the network live abroad, the easier it is to find a way to migrate. However, for foreign firms or projects with large labor needs, migration is most often mediated through private recruitment agencies that can gather from a few dozen to hundreds of migrants. 13 Currently, there are 898 private recruitment agencies in Bangladesh, regrouped under the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA) created in 1984. 14 Migration through these agencies, as discussed in Rahman (2012), proceeds as follows. 15 Recruitment agencies in a destination country send a request for a given number of migrants with specific qualifications to their counterparts in Bangladesh. The recruitment agencies in Bangladesh get initial clearance from BMET, allowing them to recruit. They are located mostly in the two large cities of Dhaka and Chittagong, while most prospective migrants are dispersed throughout the country and in rural areas. Recruitment agencies thus rely on a large number of middlemen and their subagents to help them recruit prospective migrants. These intermediaries submit information on the vital characteristics and work experience of applicants from which the agencies select future migrants. In many cases, selection includes an interview by the agency, implying that the migrant must travel to the city where the agency is located. The agencies in destination countries process the visas and pass them to the agencies in Bangladesh, which obtain final clearance from BMET. Only then is the migrant able to depart.
The middlemen provide the critical link between prospective migrants and agencies. There may be several layers of middlemen. The recruitment agency is typically in contact with a few middlemen in the city, who themselves are in contact with large numbers of middlemen in the rural areas. These subagents are from the rural areas, and many are returnee migrants themselves. Their personal knowledge of the conditions abroad and to a certain extent of the process of migration is an important source of information for prospective migrants (Akram 2007). Middlemen may also assist potential migrants in obtaining a passport if they do not already have one, passing medical check-ups, opening a bank account, or similar tasks. Middlemen are independent agents, usually working with several recruitment agencies.
The full cost of arranging for migration is borne by the migrant himself or herself. It includes formal fees and expenses (e.g., government fees, passport fees, medical check-up fee, air ticket), fees to the many intermediaries and brokers involved in the process (the recruitment agency in the destination country, the Bangladeshi recruitment agency, and all the middlemen and subagents that served as intermediaries), as well as personal costs such as travel to cities to obtain documents, get trained, go to interviews, and so on. Intermediaries’ fees are very high, with kickbacks reported in the order of US$1,500 to US$1,800. Rahman (2012) estimates that these intermediary fees account for more than 75 percent of the overall migration costs. Fees are often all paid to the intermediary who has direct contact with the aspiring migrant, and migrants do not know how much they actually pay for the different fees and to the different intermediaries. These opaque transactions leave wide open the possibility for overcharging by intermediaries. Recruitment agencies’ procedures specify that intermediaries should be paid 7 percent to 10 percent of the total cost charged to migrants and migrants should not be charged until they have been selected for a job. It is, however, very common for intermediaries to engage with a potential migrant before knowing of a job opportunity and ask for a deposit at the onset of their discussions equal to one-fourth to one-half of the agreed cost (Rahman 2011). If a job opportunity for this aspiring migrant does not materialize, intermediaries do not hesitate to leave him without news for a long time, send him for an interview to which they refer too many applicants or for which the migrant is clearly not qualified, 16 or even provide him with a false work permit or visa. Evidence also shows that some middlemen prolong the recruitment process simply to make a profit with the cash paid in advance (Rahman 2015).
In many countries, job brokers and recruiters for international migration are known to engage in fraudulent practices (Abella 2004), and recruiters of Bangladeshi workers are no exception. What makes potential migrants vulnerable is that they are mostly unskilled and poorly educated workers. Das, de Janvry, and Sadoulet (2015) found that migrants from Bangladesh had on average six years of education, 67 percent had no experience in skilled work, and 22 percent were unemployed in their home country. Similarly, Islam (2015) found that 50 percent of migrants from Bangladesh were unskilled, 16 percent semi-skilled, and the rest skilled or professionals. Most aspiring migrants know little about the process of migration and required documents (Das, de Janvry, and Sadoulet 2015), perhaps because they are not educated and certainly because institutionalized information campaigns are rarely available to them (Siddiqui, Rashid, and Zeitlyn 2008). Recruiting agencies may also cheat employers, providing low-skilled workers to employers that requested semi-skilled workers, leading the employer to refuse to pay the worker the agreed-on wage once at destination. This is yet another way in which migrants report to have been cheated by intermediaries (ILO 2014a). Migration through social networks is also importantly exposed to failure. Case study evidence from our fieldwork suggests that the family or community member’s failure originates mainly in lack of understanding of the administrative process to obtain the necessary documents and contracts. In other cases, abuse may occur within the social network itself.
Despite what appears to be a decentralized system, in the end, the total number of migrants that depart each year from Bangladesh is by and large determined by memorandums of understanding (MOUs) and bilateral agreements signed between the Bangladesh government and various countries. The ILO (2015) reports that 11 bilateral agreements and nine MOUs have been signed between the Government of Bangladesh and such countries as the UAE, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Kuwait, Oman, Malaysia, the Maldives, and the Republic of Korea. Recent negotiations include a contract with the Government of Qatar to send 30,000 female workers for domestic work and other services. Destination countries often impose further restrictions on migration flows due to Bangladesh exceeding its quota or irregularities in the process of sending migrants. This was notably the case with Saudi Arabia in 2009 for exceeding quotas (ILO 2015) and with Malaysia in 2009 for irregularities (ILO 2014b). 17
Female migration is a recent phenomenon for Bangladesh, but it seems to suffer from the same problems as male migration. An International Labour Organization study found that domestic workers are recruited through a chain of subagents that connect to recruitment agencies in Dhaka, the capital city, and that the combination of high recruitment fees, high-interest loans, and low or unpaid salaries can trap workers in exploitative situations. Human Rights Watch also reports the payment of fees of up to US$1,265, whereas Bangladeshi regulation imposes a cap at US$259. 18
Illegal or irregular migration is observed in Asian countries, including Bangladesh. 19 According to Wickramasekera (2002), irregular migrants account for 30 percent to 40 percent of the estimated six million migrants in Asia. Although a precise figure for the number of illegal migrants from Bangladesh is not available, several studies provide insights regarding illegal or irregular migration from Bangladesh to Malaysia and the Gulf countries. Ullah (2013), for example, using a sample of 72 migrants to Malaysia, shows that around 36 percent held tourist visas, 33 percent had no visas, and 9 percent had neither visa nor passport. They ultimately entered Malaysia using long overland routes that took two to three months. 20 The mean length of their stay in Malaysia was almost nine years. Illegally traveling from Bangladesh to the Gulf countries is not easy because of their location, but Ullah (2017) observes that there is a significant number of irregular migrants from Bangladesh. He interviewed 45 irregular migrants in Saudi Arabia and showed that: (1) 42 percent went on Umrah and Haj visas and overstayed, (2) 13 percent were left in Saudi Arabia by some government official, (3) 16 percent were left by some music band, and (4) the rest (29%) overstayed their tourist visas. No precise data on the number of irregular migrants from Bangladesh to Saudi Arabia are available, but Ullah (2017) mentions that nearly 40,000 Bangladeshi pilgrims went to Saudi Arabia on Umrah visas last year, and as per Saudi Government allegation, 11,483 pilgrims did not return to Bangladesh in the last few years. For Kuwait, a main destination country for Bangladeshi workers, Bangladesh has a sizeable proportion of undocumented migrants (9.2%) (De Bel-Air 2017). De Bel-Air (2017) also shows that 66 percent of all irregular migrants in Bahrain (in 2014, there were about 60,700 irregular workers) are Bangladeshi.
With migration of Bangladeshi workers to foreign countries offering both enormous promise and high risk to those attempting to migrate, we proceed to develop a database to characterize the corresponding costs, risks, and potential rewards.
Data
The data used in this paper were collected throughout Bangladesh in May-June 2013 by the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with BRAC’s (originally known as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) Research and Evaluation Division (RED). Each BRAC branch office covers a radius of four to five km, creating a network of approximately 2,100 branches that service almost all rural and urban regions of the country. In July 2011, BRAC launched a Migrant Loan Program that had been rolled out to more than 1,700 branches by 2014, of which 496 were randomly selected for our survey. We randomly selected one village within the coverage area of each branch or a neighborhood in the 44 urban branches. The 1,700 branch offices covered by this study are scattered across Bangladesh’s 64 districts, and our 496 sample branches are in 62 districts. This sample is thus largely representative of the Bangladesh population. In each village, we first conducted a short census to identify households with members that had migrated or attempted to migrate overseas over the 35-month period preceding May 2013. The census included information on the basic socioeconomic characteristics of 55,565 households, with all adults 15 to 50 years of age. A stratified sample of 10 households was then selected from the census for each village or neighborhood to obtain a strong representation of households with migrants and members that attempted but failed to migrate. These households completed a survey with extensive information on their migration experience. The sample for the survey consisted of 4,960 households with information on all adults 15 to 50 years of age. The census gives a complete picture of the intensity of migration in each village but few characteristics on the households or migrants. In contrast, the survey allows for a detailed characterization of migration experiences. All analyses done with the household survey use sampling weights.
Data collection was performed by 65 field enumerators. Each village was covered by one enumerator who (1) walked door to door to conduct the census, (2) sent the list to the central manager who drew the sample of households, and then (3) proceeded with the household survey. The census was limited to 120 households for large village/neighborhood containing more than 120 households. If no one was available to respond to the census or survey, the household was skipped and replaced by the next household on the list. The census collected information on land holdings (disaggregated by ownership status, i.e., owned and rented land) and household size. For each household member aged 15 to 50, it asked about the member’s current age, education, gender, and migration status (described in the next section) for each month since June 2010. Household-level information was collected from the household head; individual-level information from the individual, if available, and from the household head otherwise. The choice of collecting three years of information was a compromise between possible recall problems and having enough historical data to observe a sufficient number of migration attempts and capture enough complete migration events (which a priori were expected to be of two to three years, like many labor contracts). The household survey collected information on the demographic characteristics of household members, education and main occupation of members aged six years or above, and school enrollment status of children. At the household level, it collected information on the amount of productive and durable asset holdings, housing conditions, financial assets and liabilities, social networks, and food security. At the individual level, the survey collected information on all members that had been involved with migration. For migrants, it asked the destination country and migration costs. 21 For those that failed in attempting to migrate, the survey asked questions related to reasons for failure, medium through which they attempted to migrate, amount of financial losses, and so on. For individuals trying to migrate, information was asked on the medium through which the aspiring migrant was trying to migrate, amount of expenses incurred as of the interview date, and types of problems faced in attempting to migrate. The household-level information was asked to the household head if available, otherwise to the main female household member. Fifty-six percent of respondents for household-level information were household heads. Information related to migration failure and costs were collected from the concerned individuals or the main respondent if not available.
An obvious concern is the reliability of recall data, especially in the census. For migration itself, recall should not be a problem, except maybe on the exact date, as migrating to a foreign country is a pretty dramatic event that lasts for several months. As we will see in the next paragraph, the aggregate migration pattern in our sample tracks national migration, which gives further confidence in these survey data. More problematic maybe is recall of attempts at migrating that were unsuccessful. In particular, the length of the period that the person is considered trying to migrate may not be precisely defined or recalled. The binary information that we use here (whether a person has engaged in processes and expenses toward migration over the past three years) is likely less subject to error. In addition, in a different study conducted in 2015–2016, in which 2,842 similarly selected potential migrants were followed with telephone calls over a two- to six-month period, we found a failure rate of the same order of magnitude.
Migration and Migration Failure Counts from the Village Censuses
The censuses contain recall data over three years on a total of 143,164 individuals and provide information on household members and their “status” with regard to migration. For each of the 35 months recorded on the census (from June 2010 to April 2013), individuals were registered as “migrant” if they were abroad, “attempting to migrate” if they were engaged in and had committed financial resources to the process of migration, “failed migrant” if they were stopping their quest after having committed some resources, or “resident” if none of the aforementioned were true. Thus, in effect, the data allow us to establish the migration status of each individual in any particular month over this three-year period. This rich data set enables us to identify the number of migrants, old migrants, new migrants, having attempted to migrate, failed migrants, and residents based on the status they reported over the three-year period. We define six categories of individuals as follows.
Migrant
An individual is categorized as migrant if he or she reported the status of migrant at any point in time in each of the 35 months recorded in the census. Such an individual can be categorized as an old or new migrant.
Old Migrant
Old migrants are individuals who first migrated before the beginning of the recall period, namely, before June 2010. They are identified as those whose status was migrant on the first month (June 2010) of the census.
New Migrant
New migrants are individuals who migrated for the first time over the last three years, namely, migrating after June 2010 and having never migrated before. Since this is not directly reported in the data, new migrants are identified as being residents on the first month (June 2010) of the census and reporting the status of migrant in subsequent months. This may lead to an over-count of new migrations as older migrants who were visiting home on June 2010, and are thus recorded as resident on that month, will also count as new migrants. We identify these potential remigrants as being residents in June 2010 but migrating within the next six months, and this without having a period of trying to migrate. This is because when we look at the subset of older migrants, almost none in our census reported trying to migrate when visiting home or remigrating and migrants that we clearly identify as visiting home stay between two to six months (only 5% stay more than six months).
Attempting to Migrate
An individual is classified as attempting to migrate if he or she is observed as trying to migrate during the period under study but was neither successful in migrating nor had declared outright failure. Two groups are clearly distinct: Some hopeful migrants tried for many months before reporting again as residents; others were still trying to migrate by April 2013. Among the latter, we consider as failed migrants those who reported having tried to migrate for more than 12 months by April 2013.
Failed Migrant
Two definitions are used. A strict definition includes individuals with the recorded status of failed migrant at any point over the recorded 35 months. There are, however, instances mentioned previously that are not recorded as clearly but most likely reflect failures: individuals who tried to migrate during many months before getting discouraged and signing in again as resident or those who had been attempting to migrate for more than 12 months at the time of the census.
Resident
Residents are defined as the subset of individuals who were not migrant, failed migrant, or having attempted to migrate.
Participation in migration by category of migrant based on the aforementioned definitions is given in Table 1. Since almost 98 percent of migrants are male, the information is only reported for males. Of the 75,448 males in our censuses, 13.3 percent were participating in migration while 86.7 percent were residents. Of the former, 57.6 percent were migrant as of June 2010, with a staggering 43 percent of them never returning home over the three years of observation (permanent migrants). We observe 2,096 new migrants, representing 20.9 percent of the population engaged in migration. The number of potential remigrants in that group is minimal. The remaining were individuals who were either still attempting to migrate (for less than 12 months) or had failed in their migration attempt. The latter group accounts for 10.6 percent of individuals participating in migration (8.3% having explicitly failed and 2.3% having attempted without success). By construction, these four categories constitute an almost exhaustive partition of the adult population. There are only 28 cases of individuals who experienced both an event of successful migration and a failure.
Participation in Migration among the Population.
Note. Failed migrants are those that declared failure. Individuals are classified as attempted without success if they recorded trying to migrate and then abandoning or if they were still trying to migrate at the time of the census but had been doing so for more than 12 months. Residents include members of the households that are nonresidents but not migrants. The total of subcategories in the first column does not add to the total population because 28 individuals experienced both migration and failure.
Source: Household census.
While this categorization of the adult population in terms of migration status is an accurate snapshot, failure events should be measured against migration attempts during the period and not against the stock of migrants. This is what we do in Table 2, assessing failure separately for new migrants (since June 2010) and remigrating old migrants (since before June 2010). For new migrants, we previously mentioned two instances of explicit failure to migrate. Another frequent type of failure is the case of a migrant that undertook the trip to the migration destination but for various reasons returned after a very short stay there. Short migrations are not profitable enough to recoup the large cost, suggesting involuntary repatriation. While there is no explicit recording of these cases as failure, they can be identified by the length of stay at destination. An expanded measure of failure is thus defined as including very short migration durations (less than six months), namely, individuals whose status was reported as migrant for a short duration. Using the aforementioned definitions of new migrant and failed migrant, we find evidence that a large share of migration attempts result in failure. Our most conservative estimate suggests a migration failure rate of at least 28.4 percent among new migrants. If we account for discouraged attempts and define short duration migrations as failures, the rate increases to 33.6 percent and 34.6 percent, respectively, suggesting that more than one in three migration attempts were unsuccessful during these three years of observation. In contrast, we expect a much lower failure rate among attempts at remigrating by old migrants. Defining remigration for an older migrant is, however, not without ambiguity. Many of the 2,331 events that we observed were migrants who returned abroad after visiting their family, without loss of visa and/or job at their destinations. The lower-bound failure rate calculated on that population is very low, namely 0.39 percent. On the other hand, if one considers only cases where the migrant registered a period of trying to migrate before actually migrating, we may be undercounting true remigration. The corresponding upper-bound figure for the migration failure rate is 15.5 percent. Even this upper bound is less than half the failure rate of new migrants. This is not surprising as many may have kept their contact at the point of destination or simply know their way through the system.
Migration Failure among New and Old Migrants.
Note. Row 6: “Trying” before migration event is considered “proper” remigration since almost all new migrants have status trying before migrating. Row 7: This is an overcount as many visiting migrants aren’t necessarily remigrating but just at home on vacation.
Source: Household census.
Information on country-wise migration failure is not available in the survey. Thus, to understand country-wise failure rates, we use information collected for an evaluation of the Safe Migration Project implemented by BRAC in Bangladesh (Das, de Janvry, and Sadoulet 2015). The baseline survey in September-December 2014 covered a total of 3,120 potential migrants (i.e., attempting to migrate in the terminology of this paper, those who had started the process and invested time and resources). These potential migrants were identified through a village census of 608 villages from 50 subdistricts of Bangladesh. The potential migrants covered by this survey were followed up through phone calls until June 2016. In the phone survey, 2,842 potential migrants were successfully reached. Of these 2,842 individuals, 22.8 percent declared failure. Country-wise analysis shows that the failure rate is between 18 percent and 24 percent for Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Singapore, and Qatar. For UAE and Oman, it is between 26 percent and 29 percent. The failure rate for Iraq and Libya is relatively low, though these two countries account for a small proportion of potential migrants. For other countries, the rate is, on average, 28 percent.
The Cost of Migration Failure
Due to administrative procedures and distance, the cost of migration to destination countries is extremely high, especially in relation to the domestic incomes of candidates to migration. It is also highly risky as costs must be incurred as an upfront investment before success in migration is secured. The average cost of financing migration reported by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) stands at BDT$219,394 (US$3,171 at the 2009 exchange rate), which amounts to three years of income for the average Bangladeshi (IOM 2010). This happens in spite of the government-set maximum recruiting charge of BDT$84,000 (US$1,230), which applies as of 2006 to migrants going to the Gulf States and Malaysia (Martin 2010). 22 IOM (2010) shows that about 59.5 percent of these costs go to intermediaries, 10.3 percent to recruitment agencies, 9.3 percent for the visa, and the rest for airfare, passport, a medical certificate, and other expenses. Martin (2005) shows that Bangladeshi migrants in Kuwait paid in 1995 the highest recruitment fees and had the lowest monthly earnings compared to migrants from countries such as Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the expense for migrants’ airplane tickets to Gulf countries was typically borne by the employer (Gamburd 2000; Gardner 2010). Now, due to increased international competition, these charges are borne by the migrant (Shah 1994; Gamburd 2000; Gardner 2010). This has become a major hurdle to migration and a high source of risk if migration fails given the income level of potential migrant households. For this reason, the government has taken initiatives to cut the role of middlemen and recruiting agencies and directly operate as the agent for migrants. BOESL — a government recruitment agency — has been set up for this purpose. However, as mentioned earlier, it has so far met with limited coverage and modest success.
In our own household survey data, the average household spent US$3,322 to migrate (median US$3,125), with large variation, as shown in Figure 2. A large share of this cost went to intermediaries providing work permits. This cost must be incurred even if migration fails, although the earlier the aspiring migrant stops his or her quest to migration, the lower is the loss. The frequency distribution of cost of failure is reported in Figure 3. The average cost of failure is US$818 while the median cost is much lower at US$250, suggesting that many aspiring migrants declare failure early in the process. Around 30 percent of failed migrants invested more than US$1,000 in the pursuit of migration. With the average Bangladeshi earning an annual income of approximately US$1,040, the loss is substantial.
Cost of successful migrations.
Cost of migration failures.
On the behavioral side, the cost of migration failure appears to be discouragement in trying to migrate again, as least as observed within the three-year window over which data have been collected. A large share of failed migrants stop trying to migrate altogether during that period once migration failure occurred. These potential migrants were thus seemingly deprived of migration’s future benefit, at least for some time. As shown in Figure 4, which tracks the proportion of potential migrants remaining residents by month after a migration failure, approximately 80 percent made no further attempt at migrating in the following three years. Only 5 percent of potential migrants did not stop trying to migrate following a failure, and another 15 percent started trying to migrate again over the following three years. But then, as the estimated trajectory shows, residency leveled off at around 80 percent. Some migrants may have learned from failure that they were not fit for migration. However, estimating a duration model shows no evidence that the time over which potential migrants remain residents after a failure is related to their age, education, household size, or land ownership. Abandoning attempts at migrating could also be due to the large monetary loss, and failed migrants might very well try migrating again after three years. But given that the median cost of failure stands at only 10 percent of the total cost of migration, some behavioral response might also be involved.
Discouragement effect of failures over a three-year period.
We observed a differentially high rate of unemployment among people still trying to migrate in 2013 (significantly different at 1% from that of failed migrants and at 5% from that of discouraged). The rate of unemployment was 2.4 percent among residents but 15.4 percent among those still trying to migrate. This suggests that hardship, acting as a push factor, was a powerful incentive for failed migrants to keep on trying. Discouragement in trying to migrate may thus only be a transitory phenomenon as the hardship of unemployment keeps on motivating migration.
The Correlates of Migration Failure and Success
A significant factor associated with migration failure is weak demand for migrants at the international level. As mentioned earlier, aggregate migration from Bangladesh is exogenously determined based on agreements and manpower contracts signed by the Bangladeshi government with other nations. Figure 5 shows the total monthly number of migrant departures over the three years of our analysis, as reported by BMET, the official bureau in charge of migration. We observe a large increase (at a rate of 49% per year) from July 2010 until May 2012 and then a dramatic drop. This drop was due to tensions between Bangladesh and its partners, notably the UAE, a major destination country for Bangladeshi migrants, which stopped issuing all entry permits for Bangladeshi passport holders in August 2012. 23 Information from BMET indicates that the total number of Bangladeshi workers who left for the UAE fell drastically from 215,452 in 2012 to 14,241 in 2013. The drop in national departures began in June 2012, before the UAE action, as Figure 5 shows, perhaps because in late May 2012, Bangladesh banned the export of manpower to Libya as a stable government was established there. 24 As Figure 5 also shows, departures in our sample of migrants track relatively well national departures.
Migration departures per month.
In spite of fluctuating departures, the supply of individuals attempting to migrate follows a steady upward trend, as can be seen in Figure 6. In our data, we observe a steady increase in people trying to migrate at an annual rate of 39 percent. To the extent that our sample is representative of the country, it is not surprising that the observed failure rate in the sample is a mirror image of the aggregate departure of migrants. Migration failure is thus importantly demand-driven. 25 Countries have different ways of dealing with an excess supply of job seekers relative to job offers, notably selecting migrants based on explicit criteria. In Bangladesh, the issue is de facto solved through the role of intermediaries. When facing a weak job demand, intermediaries have a higher likelihood of failing to place their clients abroad and frequently opt to renege on contracts even though they have already cashed in advances for their services. Migrants are mainly rural low-skilled laborers with little education and often ignorant of the migration process or unable to deal with it on their own. Their main source of information becomes the middlemen, thereby exposing them to a high risk of fraud.
Attempts at migrating and failure rate per month.
How do potential migrants currently trying to migrate and those who declared migration failure perceive the difficulties they face in migration? This is explored in Table 3 based on questions of perception asked to potential and failed migrants. Among the first, main declared difficulties are lack of information and difficulty with the required paperwork (57%) and financial constraints (57%). In a sense, both of these difficulties could be alleviated by specialized interventions, one to assist migrants with the administrative process of migration 26 and the other to provide dedicated credit lines. Exposure to fraudulent agents (only reported in 3% of cases) is not yet revealed as individuals are still trying to migrate. However, among those who had already declared failure, more than half (51%) reported fraudulent agents or visa scams as the main causes of failure. Other important causes of failure were financial difficulties (20%), family or medical problems (19%), and failure to obtain a visa (9%).
Perceived Reasons for Migration Failure
Source: Household survey.
a The percentages do not add to 100 as individuals attempting to migrate could give two answers, and 75 of them did.
While the aggregate failure rate is importantly influenced by exogenous aggregate demand, who fails among aspiring migrants is not random. There exists a strong negative correlation between the failure rate and the total number of migrants in the village. The more migrants a village has abroad, the less the chance of failure for potential new migrants. A nonparametric estimation indicates that the failure rate declines from more than 20 percent to around 5 percent as the number of migrants in the village increases from zero to 60. Migration is thus an accelerating process whereby greater migration success is associated with more previous migrants. Successful migrants have on average 35 other migrants in the village compared to 23 for failed migrants. Other revealing contrasts between new and failed migrants suggest the importance of education. New migrants also have higher savings, but this is already partially endogenous to the migration outcome. A large share of migrants report that they finance the cost of migration by borrowing money from friends and family, while others finance it through selling or mortgaging land, selling assets such as livestock, and drawing down their savings (see information from case studies of migrants in Akram 2007). For those who lack sufficient wealth or access to wealthy patrons, difficulty of accessing credit can be a major barrier.
Another way of analyzing the difficulty of migrating is to consider the time it takes for those that try to migrate to eventually succeed. Considering all men that attempted to migrate for the first time at some point over the three years of observation, Figure 7 reports their cumulative success rate over time. Only 25 percent of those trying to migrate succeeded in migrating in six months, 50 percent in a year, and after 36 months, 40 percent had failed to achieve their goal and were still trying. The shape of the success rate curve in Figure 7 shows that after 13 months of trying, few migrants were to achieve success. Analyzing information on Bangladeshi migrants to Saudi Arabia, Rahman (2011) shows that a migrant on average needed about 5.22 months to complete the process in Bangladesh. This figure is lower than what we find in this study, likely because our estimation is based on information for migrants to all countries and includes failed attempts.
Time to success in migration.
We estimate a duration model of migration success. This analysis does not distinguish between the different forms of failure mentioned previously as they all fall under non-success, but it allows us to use all the available information, even from recent entry into the migration process, to determine the correlates of success or non-success and include varying circumstances such as the national context for migration and evolution of the migration network size. The Cox duration model specifies that the probability h(t) of being successful in any time period t is proportional to
Duration Model for Success in Migrating.
Note. Robust standard errors clustered at the individual level in parentheses. Columns (1) and (2) from household census data. Column (3) from household survey data, using sampling weights.
a Mean value from survey data.
*p < .10. **p < .05.
We perform the estimation on the full village census (Columns 1 and 2) and the survey sample (Column 3), which contains information on migration experience such as migrating through a relative and participation to a training course. The estimate indicates that aggregate departures (national migration) significantly affect the individual probability of success in migration. An additional 1,000 migrants/month is associated with an increase in the probability of being successful of 0.8 percent to 0.9 percent with census data and 1.6 percent with survey data. Availability of a community migration network is significantly correlated with a higher success rate. Having one more migrant in your village increases the probability to successfully migrate in a given month by 1.2 percent to 1.7 percent. Having one more member of your family abroad increases the probability of success by 3.3 percent (in Column 3), although this effect is not statistically significant because of a very large standard error. These effects are large. National migration exerts a significant impact on the probability of success, with a one standard deviation decrease in monthly migration associated with a 10.9 percent lower chance of success at the individual level. Since the volume of nationwide migration is exogenously determined, the relationship between migration success and nationwide migration documented in Table 4 can be interpreted as likely causal. These results are robust to controlling for total land owned by the household, housing conditions, age, education, rural/urban residence, and whether the individual has received training through a publicly available government program (Column 3). Similarly, one standard deviation of the cross-section distribution of the village network size, equal to 18.2 migrants, is associated with a 24 percent difference in the chance of success. 27 This finding that social networks are positively correlated with successful migration is consistent with results obtained by Massey and España (1987); Winters, de Janvry, and Sadoulet (2001); and Munshi (2003) for Mexico. They show that those with family or community networks face lower risks and lower costs in migration. Among individual characteristics, having an urban residence is a factor of success. This likely corresponds to better access to information and lesser dependence on intermediaries.
Will the Cost of Migration Failure Deter Future Migration?
Is the probability of failure in migration a deterrent in trying to migrate? In a Harris and Todaro (1970) perspective, the decision to migrate is given by the wage in Bangladesh (WB), the wage in the Gulf countries (WG), the cost of migration (CM), and the likelihood of success in migration (P). In our context, failure entails having incurred costs (CF) and staying in Bangladesh, where the person can earn WB. Attempt at migrating will continue for as long as the expected gain from this attempt is higher than the opportunity cost of staying in Bangladesh:
We can use this simple framework to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of migration’s net benefits. Wage data come from information we collected for an evaluation of the Safe Migration Project implemented by BRAC in Bangladesh (Das, de Janvry, and Sadoulet 2015). The baseline survey in September-December 2014 covered a total of 3,120 potential migrants (i.e., trying to migrate in the terminology of this paper, those who had started the process and invested time and resources). These potential migrants were identified through a village census of 608 villages from 50 subdistricts of Bangladesh. We collected information on their jobs and earnings and followed up with phone calls in 2015–2016. As of June 2016, 754 potential migrants were found to have left the country, and we reached 288 of them, obtaining information on their jobs and wages overseas. While this is possibly a selected subsample, Figure 8 shows that the distribution of their earnings in Bangladesh in the baseline survey is not different from that of all migrants or potential migrants. The average monthly earnings of these three groups (migrants with overseas information, migrants, and potential migrants) in Bangladesh were US$106.2, US$105.4, and US$109.1, respectively. This similarity is also found when splitting the sample between wage earners and self-employed. We will thus take WB = US$109. The average wage overseas is US$373.2, and this is similar across the different destination countries (US$373 in the Gulf and US$366.8 in Malaysia), slightly higher for those who work in construction (US$404.6) than in other jobs. We will thus takeWG = US$373. From the information reported in “The Cost of Migration Failure” section, the cost of migration to the Gulf countries is on average US$3,322. As mentioned earlier, 79.2 percent of migrants from Bangladesh work in the Gulf countries and 10 percent in Malaysia. However, according to IOM (2010), the costs of migration are quite similar for Malaysia and the Gulf countries. With a two-year contract, the cost of migration is thus CM = US$138/month. As also reported in “The Cost of Migration Failure” section, the average cost of failure is US$818, which similarly spread over two years gives CF = US$34/month.
Earnings in Bangladesh and overseas for migrants.
The expected value when attempting to migrate is a monthly income of:
which is much higher than the US$109 monthly earnings in Bangladesh. This leaves a large expected gain from migration despite the high failure rate, high cost of migration, and possible differences in costs of living, inducing aspiring migrants to try again. If left unchecked, fraudulent agents can thus still extract large rents from potential migrants before deterring attempts at migrating. A similar back-of-the-envelope calculation for a safe migration, using the benchmark cost set by the government of Bangladesh at US$1,230 or US$51/month (Martin 2010) spread over two years, will give an expected value of 373 – 51 = US$322/month. Market equilibrium will not deter fraud for a long time, even though it robs migrants of 43 percent of the expected value of a safe migration. Protection of migrants against rent extraction must come from government regulation of the migration agencies or from NGO support in informing migrants and exposing fraud.
Conclusion
International migration in search of employment is a costly and risky enterprise. When potential migrants are poor, migration failure not only robs households from a unique opportunity to move out of poverty but also pushes them further into poverty. We studied migration failure in the context of attempts by mainly young unskilled rural Bangladeshi male workers at migrating to the Gulf countries. Some attention has been given in the literature to the impact of risk on the decision to migrate and migration failure once in the country of destination. By contrast, little attention has been given to failure to leave the country when eventually large expenditures have already been incurred toward migrating. We use a unique data collection strategy to characterize migration and migration failure, combining village censuses with household surveys with high-intensity recalls on migration status over the past three years.
We find that up to 34 percent of potential migrants fail to migrate and that the average monetary loss exceeds US$818, which is nearly 80 percent of the average national per capita income. Failure to leave the country is much larger than failure once migrated. The main declared causes of failure to leave are abuse by fraudulent agents made easy by lack of information for candidates to migration and financial difficulties. Success in migration is associated with a higher level of national migration, larger village migration network, and urban residence. In spite of the high rate of migration failure and high cost of migration, the expected gain from migration remains large, explaining why the phenomenon of attempts at migrating and potential large losses from failure for poor households remains unabated.
Policy implications suggest the need to offer more information and better administrative assistance to migrants as well as give them access to lines of credit to be refunded through migration earnings. In that perspective, BRAC recently introduced both a Safe Migration Program (Purvez and Karim 2009) that provides information, assistance, and training to migrants and a Migrant Loan Program to extend microfinance loans to candidates to migration. Given the role of migration networks in successful migration, this assistance is all the more important for residents of villages with no such networks who will be less able to use migration as a shock-coping device when adversity strikes. The critical issues of fraudulent agents, falsified documents, and unmet wage expectations once at destination, leading to costly migration failures for very poor and highly exposed households, remain enormous problems that must be addressed.
Research implications of our diagnostic of the risks and proximate causes of migration failure suggest the need for careful experimentation with programs designed to reduce risks and facilitate access to migration finance for aspiring migrants. Prior research with results on such programs have been largely negative (Beam, McKenzie, and Yang 2016). This indicates that research needs to go beyond impact evaluation to experimentation with alternative potential designs for such programs, opening an area of research that could have immense welfare benefits.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Financial support was provided by the BRAC-CEGA Learning Collaborative.