Bangladeshi agents seek extension so 30k workers can fly to Malaysia

Bangladeshi recruitment agencies are urging Putrajaya to extend the deadline for migrant worker entry from Bangladesh by up to two months to allow workers who had already been approved to make their way to Malaysia.

A total of 31,701 workers from Bangladesh had obtained approval to work in Malaysia but were unable to make it to the country by the deadline today, Bangladeshi news website Kaler Kontho reported.

“We have held several meetings with the (relevant Bangladeshi) ministry in this regard. We talked about extending the time by one or two months. Then all the workers could have been sent.

“Because if the workers can’t go, they will suffer financial losses,” the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (Baira) told Kaler Kontho yesterday.

Baira last year estimated that each worker would have to pay up to RM20,000 in various fees at multiple levels of agents in the recruitment process, where agencies that are syndicated share the money at different levels.

Kaler Kontho’s checks found the Bangladesh government had last issued approvals to workers to depart for Malaysia on May 21.

Recruitment agents also complained that costs to send workers had ballooned because flight tickets are more expensive, driven by the rush to meet the May 31 deadline.

One worker, Akhirul Islam, told Bangladesh’s The Business Standard that he had received his visa a while back, but was waiting for his agency to inform him of when he should leave.

He only learnt he had to be in Malaysia by May 31 on May 21 and by then flight tickets had skyrocketed from 40,000 taka to 100,000 taka, the daily reported today.

Putrajaya had in March announced that it is not budging from the May 31 deadline for migrant workers to arrive under Labour Recalibration Programme 2.0.

Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail said recruitment quotas held by Malaysian companies, which have yet to be fulfilled by today, will expire tomorrow.

This has prompted a mad rush of migrant workers entering Malaysia, with Kuala Lumpur International Airport terminals forced to cope with four times the arrival capacity over the past few days.

Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail

Workers stranded at airport for days

Images circulating on social media, believed to be captured at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport Terminal, show the terminals packed with groups said to be newly arrived migrant workers.

They were sitting on the floors, waiting to go through immigration and to be fetched by their employers.

“Under normal circumstances, the daily number of migrant workers’ arrival is between 500 and 1,000 people. The arrival number increased to up to 2,500 people on May 22 and by May 27, it was between 4,000 and 4,500 individuals daily,” Immigration Department director-general Ruslin Jusoh said yesterday.

Some workers told Kaler Kantho they had been waiting for their employers for three or four days because the overcrowding had made it difficult to process them at the airport.

To cope, the Immigration Department has set up more counters and provided food and drinks to the migrants waiting to be processed.

Separately, migrant rights NGO Tenaganita and North South Initiative said they learnt that many of the workers who have arrived in the past days do not have ready employment.

Some, they believe, are victims of debt bondage and may have even paid bogus recruitment agents exorbitant fees to secure their passage to Malaysia, for jobs that do not exist.

“We have never seen such a scene like this before. The people who have money now will try to bring in as many workers as they can, as fast as they can. But what happens to the workers if they don’t have jobs?” North South Initiative executive director Adrian Pereira asked.

According to Bangladesh government data, officially some 44,727 workers were sent to Malaysia from January to April, amounting to about 14 percent of all migrant workers from the country this year.

The country also received US$541.99 million in remittances from Malaysia in the same period, amounting to seven percent of all remittances to Bangladesh from overseas workers.

Last year, 351,683 Bangladeshi migrant workers were in Malaysia, amounting to about 27 percent of all Bangladeshi working abroad that year. They contributed US$1.26 billion in remittance to Bangladesh in 2023. - Mkini