Explaining the Bangladeshi immigrant surge into Italy
A Bangladeshi migrant selling selfie sticks in central Rome, where police often try to deter street vendors from working in major tourist sites. PHOTO | IRIN
What you need to know:
- Taking a break, Naheen holds out his palm. It bears a long scar, a reminder of being robbed at knifepoint as he was leaving Libya just over a week ago.
- The 24-year-old Bangladeshi paid 1,000 euros for a spot on a wooden boat, but there were other costs too. Before departing, his smugglers stripped him and his 300 fellow passengers of all their remaining valuables.
Several abandoned lots west of the Catania bus station in Sicily, Naheen stands on a street corner selling packets of tissues while his brother cleans car windscreens for spare change.
Taking a break, Naheen holds out his palm. It bears a long scar, a reminder of being robbed at knifepoint as he was leaving Libya just over a week ago.
The 24-year-old Bangladeshi paid 1,000 euros for a spot on a wooden boat, but there were other costs too. Before departing, his smugglers stripped him and his 300 fellow passengers of all their remaining valuables.
“There were many Somalis and people from other African countries,” he recalled. “It was so dangerous. I can’t swim, but I did it because I couldn’t stay in Libya.”
Naheen had worked as a medical assistant in a Tripoli hospital for three years. Like most of the 20,000 Bangladeshi workers still in Libya, he got the job through a recruitment agency back home. The agency arranged his visa and travel for a fee of 3,000 euros. The overseas employment of Bangladeshi contract labourers has become synonymous with exploitation and low wages, but the poor working conditions and deteriorating security situation in Libya proved more difficult than Naheen was willing to bear.
Now in Catania, Naheen works the streets to earn money with his brother, who arrived seven months earlier. The two represent the latest shift in Europe-bound migration: a steep increase in the number of Bangladeshis arriving by boat from Libya.
From the beginning of the year until May 22, 5,650 Bangladeshis arrived in Italy, accounting for 11 per cent of all arrivals of undocumented migrants to the country, according to the Italian Ministry of the Interior. During roughly the same period last year, just 10 Bangladeshi nationals had arrived by boat, although by the end of 2016, 7,578 had disembarked in Italy, according to Ahmad Al Rousan, who tracks migration numbers for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Italy.
According to Al Rousan and other experts IRIN interviewed, the new arrivals from Bangladesh can be divided into two main groups.
The first are those, like Naheen, who after working in Libya for several years, have begun to flee the country as security conditions have worsened in the past year.
Experts estimate that between 50,000 and 80,000 Bangladeshis were working in Libya at the beginning of the civil war that ousted former dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and that only a fraction were able to flee the country in the immediate aftermath, as they struggled to secure resources or state assistance for transportation.
The second and faster-growing group of new arrivals are Bangladeshis who travel to Tripoli via Istanbul or Dubai with the explicit goal of reaching Europe.
Al Rousan said agencies in Bangladesh are charging migrants between $7,000 and $10,000 to facilitate the journey to Europe, the majority of which they keep for themselves. While there are no direct commercial flights from Bangladesh to Libya, non-stop flights from Istanbul to Tripoli start at about 200 euros. From Dubai, the price is roughly 500 euros.
Once in Libya, migrants must still pay smugglers for the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, where 1,569 people have lost their lives so far this year.
Mehedi, a teenager who arrived in Sicily a few months ago, flew from Dhaka to Tripoli via Istanbul on a fake work visa issued by a Bangladeshi agency.
When he arrived in Libya, he was met at the airport by an intermediary and taken to a safe house. From there he called his parents who, having confirmed his arrival, paid the agency 6,000 euros. But shortly afterwards, he was picked up by police in Tripoli and jailed for six months. Asked about conditions in detention, Mehedi only frowned.
Numerous organisations, including MSF, have highlighted the appalling conditions and levels of abuse inside Libya’s migrant detention centres.
Eventually, Mehedi was released and his family wired him over 800 euros to pay a smuggler for an Italy-bound boat. After being rescued at sea and brought to Sicily, he was sent to a state-run reception centre where he applied for asylum.
Applications are decided on a case-by-case basis that could take years, given the volume of claims Italy is dealing with.
The writer filed this article for IRIN from Catania
