Potential role of NRBs in national development
Friday, 5 October 2007
Hasan Mahmud
OVER last few years, Bangladesh has been receiving a significant amount of the remittances flowing from the developed to the developing world thanks to the up-surging labour migration. The dramatic increase of the flow of remittances has created optimism that Bangladesh may overcome the shortage of funds that constricts its development attempts. This has attracted the attention of the media as well as the academia to the migrant labourers and the Non-Resident Bangladeshis (NRBs) who send the remittances money to Bangladesh by saving the hard-earned money abroad.
In the current discourse of international migration in Bangladesh, all the remittances earners -- the migrant labourers and the NRBs -- are found to be divided into sharply two different groups: on one hand, there are migrant labourers, comprising the members of poor families in rural Bangladesh. They populate the lowest end of the job market anywhere in the world. They have to exert themselves to earn in the foreign lands. They have to endure immense pain to save so that they can send a handsome amount back home.
A worker's account of the working condition in Japan depicts the plight of these remittance earners perspicuously: "Seven men sleeping in two small rooms, woke up at the crack of dawn, went off to work, and did not return till midnight. 16 hours a day, seven days a week, week in week out, month in month out. Some of their work -- work in the factories, painting car bodies, soldering electronic components, and most terrifying of all, cleaning the windows of skyscrapers in the financial downtown, a few hundred feet high in the Tokyo sky. Death-defying work, even if well-paid." The work environment is bleak all over the world for these people.
On the other hand, there are NRBs who include the upper and upper-middle class Bangladeshis who have migrated and settled in the developed countries. They have advanced education, and hence good employments and social connections that enable them to circumvent much of the problems while living abroad. In a nutshell, the have been successful in attaining a prosperous life abroad that everybody dreams of.
A popular generalisation about the migrant workers and the NRBs has emerged considering the relative contribution of these two groups of Bangladeshis in terms of sending remittances. It is found that the migrant workers send most of what they earn and thus contributes the lion's share of the total amount of remittances to Bangladesh. But the well-off NRBs, who earn large amounts of money compared to the workers, send very little, and sometimes, nothing. Thus, the former group is applauded as patriots while the later is denigrated as escapees. The latter group is further despised when one realises that these received considerable state support in their education, health, and other facilities to get prepared to fly abroad, while the migrant workers received almost nothing since they came from the poor and illiterate rural households.
Thus, we appreciate the migrant workers for their altruistic and patriotic contribution to national development through sending remittances. And we deride those NRBs who received supports from the state and earn handsome amounts abroad but are reluctant to send remittances for national development. But such a generalisation is essentially injurious to realising the full developmental potential of remittances since this conceptualises the migrant workers as poor and patriotic, while defines the NRBs as rich and averse to national development.
It has already been proved by numbers of studies that the migrant workers are quite well-off, if not spectacularly rich, in all developing societies including Bangladesh. For the very process of migration involves considerable amount of money and social network to manage the travel as a migrant worker in Tokyo from Bikrampur exemplifies: "He planted potatoes in the black soil of Bikrampur for several years before he had finally saved up enough. The selling out of some of family properties and borrowing also provided some fund." Why did these people save, borrow and sell off assets to put together the fees that the adom-bepari would charges is not their patriotism, rather the stipulated individual financial gains, the acquisition of silver that pour in immediately after their arrival at the land of fortune. It is their rational calculation that drives them to take risk, to try their luck abroad given the limited opportunity of upward mobility in their home country. They are not essentially the desperate poor, but instead they are from the rich or at least well-off families.
However, it must be recognised that they live and work in most inhumane conditions abroad, and also save as much as they can to send back home. Given the structural constraints in the host societies, the NBRs have literally no opportunity to settle down and to have improved life opportunities. Thus, they have to plan a better future in Bangladesh on return. This is the main drive that draws out remittances from the temporary migrant workers. Furthermore, the success stories of some returnees circulate among these workers that give them moral strength to continue working hard and dream of bright future in Bangladesh.
One more point may deserve attention: Why do these people, being well off in Bangladesh, dare to take such uncountable risk to move abroad since not everybody succeeds? If there is no certainty of success, why do the economically rational people take such risk? If we consider their social background along with their aspiration for upward mobility, their effort does make sense. They are mostly the people from the upper-middle and middle strata of Bangladesh society, either of declining rural/urban elite, or of an incipient upper class. Their imagined placement in the upper strata that they wish they could belong to, drives them to work recklessly. Such a strong desire motivates them to take incalculable risk to invest all that they possess to arrange moving abroad. And it is this desire that encourages them sending money back home and dream a substantially better social position on their return than what they had left with.
The same logic applies to most of the diasporas in world history, the Chinese and Chileans rushing to California, Kerela Nurses to the Middle-East and the US, West Europeans to the Latin Americas, etc. Therefore, this is not necessarily their patriotism, nor is a part of their survival strategy in general economic terms, but their imagined upward social mobility that lies at the heart of going abroad.
..........................................................
The writer is a Monbusho Scholar in the Global Studies Programme, Sophia University, Japan and may be reached at '[email protected]'
— To be continued
OVER last few years, Bangladesh has been receiving a significant amount of the remittances flowing from the developed to the developing world thanks to the up-surging labour migration. The dramatic increase of the flow of remittances has created optimism that Bangladesh may overcome the shortage of funds that constricts its development attempts. This has attracted the attention of the media as well as the academia to the migrant labourers and the Non-Resident Bangladeshis (NRBs) who send the remittances money to Bangladesh by saving the hard-earned money abroad.
In the current discourse of international migration in Bangladesh, all the remittances earners -- the migrant labourers and the NRBs -- are found to be divided into sharply two different groups: on one hand, there are migrant labourers, comprising the members of poor families in rural Bangladesh. They populate the lowest end of the job market anywhere in the world. They have to exert themselves to earn in the foreign lands. They have to endure immense pain to save so that they can send a handsome amount back home.
A worker's account of the working condition in Japan depicts the plight of these remittance earners perspicuously: "Seven men sleeping in two small rooms, woke up at the crack of dawn, went off to work, and did not return till midnight. 16 hours a day, seven days a week, week in week out, month in month out. Some of their work -- work in the factories, painting car bodies, soldering electronic components, and most terrifying of all, cleaning the windows of skyscrapers in the financial downtown, a few hundred feet high in the Tokyo sky. Death-defying work, even if well-paid." The work environment is bleak all over the world for these people.
On the other hand, there are NRBs who include the upper and upper-middle class Bangladeshis who have migrated and settled in the developed countries. They have advanced education, and hence good employments and social connections that enable them to circumvent much of the problems while living abroad. In a nutshell, the have been successful in attaining a prosperous life abroad that everybody dreams of.
A popular generalisation about the migrant workers and the NRBs has emerged considering the relative contribution of these two groups of Bangladeshis in terms of sending remittances. It is found that the migrant workers send most of what they earn and thus contributes the lion's share of the total amount of remittances to Bangladesh. But the well-off NRBs, who earn large amounts of money compared to the workers, send very little, and sometimes, nothing. Thus, the former group is applauded as patriots while the later is denigrated as escapees. The latter group is further despised when one realises that these received considerable state support in their education, health, and other facilities to get prepared to fly abroad, while the migrant workers received almost nothing since they came from the poor and illiterate rural households.
Thus, we appreciate the migrant workers for their altruistic and patriotic contribution to national development through sending remittances. And we deride those NRBs who received supports from the state and earn handsome amounts abroad but are reluctant to send remittances for national development. But such a generalisation is essentially injurious to realising the full developmental potential of remittances since this conceptualises the migrant workers as poor and patriotic, while defines the NRBs as rich and averse to national development.
It has already been proved by numbers of studies that the migrant workers are quite well-off, if not spectacularly rich, in all developing societies including Bangladesh. For the very process of migration involves considerable amount of money and social network to manage the travel as a migrant worker in Tokyo from Bikrampur exemplifies: "He planted potatoes in the black soil of Bikrampur for several years before he had finally saved up enough. The selling out of some of family properties and borrowing also provided some fund." Why did these people save, borrow and sell off assets to put together the fees that the adom-bepari would charges is not their patriotism, rather the stipulated individual financial gains, the acquisition of silver that pour in immediately after their arrival at the land of fortune. It is their rational calculation that drives them to take risk, to try their luck abroad given the limited opportunity of upward mobility in their home country. They are not essentially the desperate poor, but instead they are from the rich or at least well-off families.
However, it must be recognised that they live and work in most inhumane conditions abroad, and also save as much as they can to send back home. Given the structural constraints in the host societies, the NBRs have literally no opportunity to settle down and to have improved life opportunities. Thus, they have to plan a better future in Bangladesh on return. This is the main drive that draws out remittances from the temporary migrant workers. Furthermore, the success stories of some returnees circulate among these workers that give them moral strength to continue working hard and dream of bright future in Bangladesh.
One more point may deserve attention: Why do these people, being well off in Bangladesh, dare to take such uncountable risk to move abroad since not everybody succeeds? If there is no certainty of success, why do the economically rational people take such risk? If we consider their social background along with their aspiration for upward mobility, their effort does make sense. They are mostly the people from the upper-middle and middle strata of Bangladesh society, either of declining rural/urban elite, or of an incipient upper class. Their imagined placement in the upper strata that they wish they could belong to, drives them to work recklessly. Such a strong desire motivates them to take incalculable risk to invest all that they possess to arrange moving abroad. And it is this desire that encourages them sending money back home and dream a substantially better social position on their return than what they had left with.
The same logic applies to most of the diasporas in world history, the Chinese and Chileans rushing to California, Kerela Nurses to the Middle-East and the US, West Europeans to the Latin Americas, etc. Therefore, this is not necessarily their patriotism, nor is a part of their survival strategy in general economic terms, but their imagined upward social mobility that lies at the heart of going abroad.
..........................................................
The writer is a Monbusho Scholar in the Global Studies Programme, Sophia University, Japan and may be reached at '[email protected]'
— To be continued