Remove hurdles in sending workers to Malaysia

It is a piece of good news that Malaysia, a major destination for Bangladeshi expatriate workers, has planned to revamp their system of recruiting workers from foreign lands. According to a report in this newspaper yesterday, the country’s home ministry is going to play a major role in the management of foreign workers from January 15. In fact, the ministry will be the main custodian in the recruitment of foreign workers by the companies there.
The concerned people in the sector are of the opinion that Bangladesh would be a beneficiary because of this change in the Malaysian expatriate workers management system at a time when sending workers to Malaysia from Bangladesh hit a snag due to difficulty in the recruiting process. The President of Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA) has reacted to the news saying that Malaysian initiatives to ease difficulties in the recruitment process are good news for Bangladeshi workers.
Though Bangladesh’s economy depends on the remittance of the workers in a major way-remittance is the second most important driver of Bangladesh’s economy-the fact remains that the government has conspicuously failed to make it easy for Bangladeshi aspirant workers to go to the host countries. Workers have to pay double, treble, or even quadruple to the recruiting agencies than what is fixed by the government as fees.
Still, failure to stop illegal migration of workers with false documents and sending them back by the host countries has made it a considerable image crisis of Bangladesh in the foreign lands. Allegedly the host countries send Bangladeshi workers back home because of their dishonesty and activities of theft. Hence, only workers with good profiles and valid documents should land in foreign countries. But sadly all these problems still persist in the sector as they used to be in the past.
The report further says, the Malaysian companies recently sent demands for more than two lakh workers, but only 32,000 of them were sent to that country so far. Although the economy of Bangladesh is currently going through a deep crisis, the government is yet to remove the hurdles that are on the way of sending manpower to Malaysia.
It is now absolutely necessary to simplify the online process, ease the evaluation of employers’ qualifications to hire foreign workers, the immigration process as well as security checks. Bangladesh that cannot create new jobs for the jobless youth can hardly afford to miss opportunities of sending them abroad.