When a Passport Becomes a Measure of a Country’s Failure
A passport is more than a booklet of visas and immigration stamps. It is a measure of how the world perceives the people who carry it.
Behind every visa-free destination lies a certain degree of international trust: trust that visitors will return, respect immigration rules and use their freedom of movement for legitimate purposes.
By that measure, Bangladesh’s passport is telling an increasingly uncomfortable story.
According to the Henley & Partners Passport Index, Bangladeshi citizens can currently travel to only 37 countries without obtaining a visa in advance or with visa-on-arrival access, placing Bangladesh 95th among 101 countries.
Singaporeans, by contrast, enjoy access to 192 destinations.
The usual explanation is straightforward. Too many Bangladeshis overstay visas, use fraudulent documents, enter countries irregularly or seek asylum without meeting the conventional criteria for refugee protection. There is considerable truth in this explanation.
But it is also an incomplete one. If we reduce the problem to the supposed dishonesty or desperation of individual migrants, we miss the larger question: why has legal mobility become so difficult for so many Bangladeshis that dangerous and irregular routes are increasingly appearing attractive?
The passport problem, therefore, should not be viewed merely as a problem with passports. It is a problem with the relationship between Bangladesh and the global migration system.
The numbers emerging from Africa make this particularly clear. According to UNHCR data cited in a report by Bonik Barta, 60,546 Bangladeshis applied for asylum or refugee status in African countries between 2021 and 2025. Only 850 were registered as refugees.
These figures should immediately provoke serious questions. Africa is not traditionally the principal destination associated with Bangladeshi asylum seekers.
Yet thousands of people are now making applications there, suggesting that migration routes are changing in response to restrictions elsewhere.
This is where the issue becomes more troubling. For some migrants, Africa may not be the final destination at all. Countries such as Morocco and Tunisia can function as gateways towards Europe because of their geographic location.
South Africa and other African countries can also appear to migrants as places where they might establish themselves temporarily, find work, seek protection or eventually move elsewhere.
Africa, in other words, is increasingly becoming part of a broader migration strategy rather than simply a destination in itself.
This should change the way Bangladesh thinks about irregular migration.
A person who travels thousands of kilometres, pays a broker, crosses unfamiliar borders and enters an uncertain asylum process is not necessarily making an irrational decision.
The decision may be extremely risky, but risk itself often becomes rational when legal alternatives are perceived to be closed.
That does not make irregular migration acceptable. It explains why it happens.
Bangladesh has spent decades building an economy that depends heavily on overseas employment.
Remittances have become an important pillar of the country’s economic stability, while millions of families depend directly or indirectly on migrant income.
Yet the country has not developed an equally sophisticated system for making migration safe, affordable and skill-based.
The contradiction is striking: Bangladesh wants to export workers, but many of those workers must navigate an expensive, opaque and broker-dominated process before they can legally leave.
For a young Bangladeshi facing limited employment opportunities at home, the decision can therefore become brutally simple. Stay and struggle to find adequately paid work, or borrow heavily and trust a middleman who promises employment abroad.
If the formal route is too expensive, too restrictive or inaccessible, the informal route begins to look tempting.
Once someone has invested money and hope in leaving the country, returning empty-handed becomes psychologically and financially difficult.
This is where the migration industry deserves much greater scrutiny. The discussion often focuses on migrants who violate immigration rules, while insufficient attention is paid to the networks that make such journeys possible.
Fraudulent documents do not manufacture themselves. Irregular journeys do not happen without intermediaries.
Unscrupulous brokers, recruiters and trafficking networks thrive precisely where information is scarce, regulation is weak and desperate people are willing to pay enormous sums for uncertain promises.
The state cannot outsource responsibility for this ecosystem to individual migrants.
At the same time, Bangladesh must acknowledge an uncomfortable reality about the international labour market.
The world may still need Bangladeshi workers, but increasingly it wants skilled, certified and adaptable workers rather than simply large numbers of low-cost labourers.
Language ability, technical training, professional certification and familiarity with foreign workplace standards now determine mobility more than sheer willingness to work.
This creates another paradox. Bangladesh has a huge population and a large potential workforce, yet many workers cannot access the jobs available internationally because they lack the skills that destination countries demand.
The result is a peculiar form of unemployment: people are willing to work, foreign employers need workers, but the two sides cannot connect efficiently.
The passport is then weakened by a problem much deeper than immigration misconduct. It reflects a shortage of institutional credibility.
When countries tighten visa rules for Bangladeshis, they are responding not only to individual cases but also to patterns.
A high rate of visa overstays, irregular migration or questionable asylum claims can make an entire nationality more difficult to assess.
The consequence is collective. A Bangladeshi student with a genuine admission letter, a skilled professional with a job offer and a tourist with sufficient funds may all face additional scrutiny because of the behaviour of others.
That is the cruel mathematics of passport power. Individual trustworthiness does not always translate into collective trust.
Yet Bangladesh should also resist the temptation to portray its citizens abroad simply as a national embarrassment.
Many irregular migrants are products of circumstances rather than criminals in the conventional sense.
Some have been deceived by brokers. Some have sold land or borrowed money to finance migration. Some are escaping economic insecurity.
Others may have genuine protection concerns. Treating all of them as irresponsible lawbreakers would make policy easier, but it would not make migration safer.
The answer is neither to encourage irregular migration nor to shame those who attempt it. The answer is to make legality more attractive than illegality.
Most importantly, migration should be treated as a national economic strategy rather than an individual survival strategy.
The government should know which countries are likely to require nurses, technicians, caregivers, construction workers, drivers, hospitality workers and other professionals five or ten years from now.
Training should begin before recruitment, not after a worker has already paid a broker. Bilateral labour agreements should contain mechanisms for wage protection, dispute resolution and worker mobility.
The cost of legal migration should be reduced enough that a worker does not have to choose between an expensive formal route and a dangerous informal one.
A strong passport cannot compensate for weak domestic institutions. Nor can better migration management substitute for decent employment, social security and economic opportunity at home.
The ultimate measure of a country’s success is not how many of its citizens can leave without a visa. It is whether citizens have meaningful choices about whether to leave at all.
Bangladesh should certainly seek to restore the credibility of its passport. But that will not happen through diplomatic persuasion alone. Passport strength is ultimately earned through the behaviour of citizens, the reliability of institutions, the quality of migration management and the confidence other countries place in a nation’s people.
(The writer is an Academic, Journalist, and Political Analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT. He can be reached at nazmulalam.rijohn@gmail.com)
