Sheikh Selim
Oniket Research Group
Bangladesh sends hundreds of thousands of workers abroad every year, and the remittances they send home, which topped thirty billion US dollars in the 2025 financial year, are routinely presented by politicians and economists as proof that the country’s labor export strategy is working. A 2026 analysis published in The Oniket Bulletin by Sheikh Selim challenges that framing directly, arguing that the headline remittance figure conceals the real financial and social costs migration imposes on workers, families, and the national economy before a single dollar comes home.
That analysis, together with the well documented record of fraud in the Malaysia and Gulf recruitment corridors, points to a set of legal reforms the current government cannot keep deferring. The current article is a motivation to engage in this discussion.
The Debt Economy Behind Departure
As Selim (2026) lays out, the migration journey for most Bangladeshi workers begins with borrowing rather than opportunity. Drawing on OKUP research, the article reports that about 76 percent of Bangladeshi migrant workers borrow money to finance their departure, with recruitment fees among South Asia’s highest due to a layered chain of dalals, sub agents, and licensed agencies each taking a cut. Gulf bound workers often pay three to six times the legal fee cap, financed through high interest informal loans or mortgaged land, consuming their first or second year of earnings before households see any real gain.
This mirrors abuses in the Malaysia corridor, where nearly 500,000 workers who migrated between 2022 and 2024 paid thousands of dollars each into a syndicate-controlled recruitment system, many arriving to no job. The Gulf case is subtler but similar, with oversight repeatedly finding sub agents overcharging Saudi bound workers far beyond official limits.
The Hidden Tax on the Way Home
Selim (2026) also identifies a second, less visible drain on migrant households: the cost of moving money itself. It reports that Bangladesh’s average remittance transfer cost reached 9.4 percent in 2024, well above the global average of 6.5 percent and the broader South Asian range of 2.8 to 5.1 percent and calculates that Bangladeshi migrants overpaid an estimated 1.3 billion US dollars in excess remittance fees in 2024 alone, totaling roughly 2.3 billion dollars in accumulated excess cost across 2022 to 2024.
As the article puts it, that money represents unpaid school fees and deferred medical care rather than an abstract statistic, a cost that compounds on top of the debt already taken on to fund the migration itself.
The article also sharply contrasts this system with how wealthier Bangladeshis are treated when they buy residency or citizenship abroad through golden visa schemes. While poor and working-class migrants face steep costs both to leave and to send money home, wealthy households can move their capital out of the country under rules that frame it as strategic investment, even though it functions as a loss of productive capital.
What the Government Must Prioritize
The debt burden documented in Selim (2026) and the recruitment fraud recorded in the Malaysia and Gulf corridors point to the same underlying failure: a legal and regulatory framework that leaves ordinary migrants exposed at every stage of the journey, from recruitment to remittance. Three reforms should come first.
Recruitment expenses should transition to an employer funded structure, holding licensed agencies accountable for overcharging carried out by the unlicensed sub agents they engage, directly addressing the debt driven departures Selim (2026) describes. Remittance systems require stronger regulation, including mandatory fee disclosure and greater competition among formal transfer operators, to narrow the gap between Bangladesh’s 9.4 percent transfer cost and the regional benchmark cited.
Additionally, tackling recruitment fraud, including large scale syndicate abuses like those seen in Malaysia, demands dedicated prosecutorial resources and genuine cross border cooperation, rather than the informal diplomatic appeals that have defined the government’s approach until now.
Conclusion
Selim (2026)‘s core argument, that remittance totals mask rather than measure the true cost of Bangladesh’s migration strategy, reframes what reform is actually for. It is not enough to chase higher remittance numbers or open new labor markets abroad. The government must close the gap between what migration promises struggling families and what it currently extracts from them at every step, from the loan taken to leave to the fee paid to send money home.
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