Like many Bangladeshis, he used his life savings, including $2,600 from the sale of his laundry shop, to travel to the Middle East where he could earn much more than in his own country to support his two young children.
But instead of staying for five years like he planned, which would have set him up comfortably with a house in Bangladesh, the 35-year-old arrived back in Dhaka this week and is now desperately searching for work.
“My supervisor in Dubai came to us one morning and said we had lost our jobs at the laundry plant where we worked. There were 50 of us sacked that day and within hours we were on a plane,” said Khalil.
He told AFP he was unaware of the global economic downturn but knew that an increasing number of Bangladeshis were coming home from the Middle East and often given just a couple of hours’ notice.
In Malaysia, where unemployment is rising and a recession appears likely, the government this week revoked visas for 55,000 Bangladeshis, most of whom had planned to work in factories there.
Bleak
The Malaysian Trades Union Congress campaigned for the move, saying the country’s situation was bleak enough without additional foreign manpower being brought in.
Migrant workers have for years helped prop up Bangladesh’s economy, with spiralling oil prices opening up a whole new market for labourers who moved to the Middle East for jobs in the booming construction industry.
Unofficially, at least nine million Bangladeshis, including those who leave through illegal channels, are thought to work overseas, according to recruitment agents. Officially, the figure is 6.3 million.
Last year alone, remittances pumped nine billion dollars into the economy — more than 10 percent of its gross domestic product — helping Bangladesh pay its rising import bills.
That money also helped to build millions of houses and spawned an industrial revolution that saw Bangladesh’s economy growing at more than six percent annually in the past four years.
But the economic crisis and falling oil prices have ended the boom for the Gulf States and elsewhere — dashing the job prospects of many young Bangladeshis.
Fairy tale
“Oil hit $140 a barrel last year. Now it’s hovering around $40 a barrel. The fairy tale is coming to an end. There is hardly any construction going on at the moment in Dubai,” M. Moniruzzaman, from the Bangladesh Embassy in Dubai, told AFP by telephone.
“It’s an alarming situation. Every day thousands of Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani workers are losing their jobs and no one can say when things will improve.”
The Bangladesh government said overseas jobs fell by more than 40,000 in January compared to a year ago with the downward trend continuing into February.
Recruitment agents forecast that the market will get much worse before it gets better.
“In the last two years we sent abroad a record 1.6 million workers. This year we will be lucky if we can send 400,000,” said Golam Mostafa, president of the 800-member Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agents.
It is a problem that has Dhaka officials scrambling for ideas.
“We are trying to explore alternatives. Libya has just started taking a lot of people for construction and many other sectors. We’re also looking at places like Romania,” Labour Minister Khandkor Mosharraf Hossain said.
But with the economies of Eastern European nations also becoming increasingly exposed to the global economic turmoil, he acknowledges that options for Bangladeshis are being limited by worldwide trends.
“This is a global crisis and we cannot do much about it. We should not panic, but we are monitoring it closely and trying to prepare ourselves.”
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