Experts and rights activists have called for greater regional cooperation to help protect migrants' interests and prevent illegal migration from the Asian countries.
According to them, human trafficking and irregular migration are taking place in Asian region mainly because of existing restrictions on formal migration.
Participants at a media workshop in Kathmandu also observed that in terms of migration cost, migrants' protection and remittance earnings, there are variations among member-states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
Because of involvement of middlemen, the cost of migration has increased in Bangladesh. Journalists from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and India participated in the workshop.
In a globalised world where commodities, capital, information and technology are facilitated to move freely, movement of labour is restricted. If there were freedom of movement, irregular migration would have not existed, said C R Abrar, executive director of RMMRU while presenting a power-point presentation.
He also said women are more disadvantaged and vulnerable in irregular situations.
The Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) of Dhaka University with the support of 'Migrating out of Poverty', a research programme of the UK, organised the workshop. Dr Jagannath Adhikari, an economist of Nepal and Angela Haynes, research manager of the Research Programme Consortium (RPC) of the UK spoke about different issues in migration.
The workshop also revealed that a Nepali citizen pays half of what a Bangladeshi citizen spends to get an overseas job under the arrangement of private recruiting agencies. A Nepali citizen can go to a Middle Eastern country by paying 150,000 to 250,000 Nepali rupees (US$ 1,500 to US$ 2,500) while a Bangladeshi needs to spend Tk 3,00,000 to Tk 6,00,000 ( US$ 3,500 to US$ 7,500) for the same job.
The Bangladesh government sets Tk 84,000 as the migration expense for a Bangladeshi national for a Middle East job against the Nepali government's set amount of NR 80,000.
The outbound workers from both the countries prefer employment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Malaysia.
Experts said restrictions on overseas employment and trading of visas by recruiters were mainly responsible for spiraling of migration costs in these countries.
They said the recruiting agencies are charging fairly higher amount than the government-set ceiling for migration in both the countries.
A former member of the Planning Commission of Nepal and also an expert from the Nepal Institute of Development Studies Ganesh Gurung said, there were a total of 232 million migrants in the world moving from one place to another.
Of them, 12.40 per cent of migrants are from South Asian Countries, he said.
However, Tasneem Siddiqui, chair of RMMRU said migration helps poverty reduction. In Bangladesh, 13 per cent migrant House Holds (HHs) are below poverty line while for non-migrant HHs it is 40 per cent and for internal migrants 46 per cent.
Bandita Sijapati, an expert on disaster preparedness and research director at the Centre for the Study of Labour and Mobility (CESLAM), said issues relating to migration are not only important in the context of natural disasters but are also likely to have considerable impact on the recovery and rehabilitation process.
The CESLAM carried out a study a month after the quake in four of the 14 severely affected districts Sindhupal-chowk, Kavrepalanchowk, Dhading and Kathmandu.
Of 166 households surveyed, 115 were migrant households (including both internal and external) and 51 were non-migrant.
The findings showed that most families asked their migrant members not to return and instead continue to provide support during rehabilitation by remitting additional funds.
But then, 73 per cent of the households with external migrants reported that their absence had a negative impact on the household's post-earthquake resettlement.
In fiscal 2013-14 alone, approximately half a million Nepalis got foreign jobs. The official remittance received during the first nine months of 2013-2014 was Nepali Rs.400 billion ($4 billion), or close to 30 per cent of the country's total GDP.
Meanwhile, during a field visit to the earthquake- devastated areas in Dhading, a Nepali district about 100 kilometers off the capital, the correspondents observed that migrant's family members, mainly females, are still waiting for their husbands to come back home to repair their destroyed houses on the hills.
They are living at makeshift tents vulnerably made of plastic papers where weather remains very hot at day and at night it is very cold. Strong community support helped them to make their new shelters while they got little bit of government support to survive.
Lalita Koirala and Kalpana Koirala of east Nepal's Dhading district have survived the quake but their husbands work abroad. The two are desperately waiting for them to return to start rebuilding of their houses.
Lalita's husband works in the Gulf while Kalpana's spouse in Malaysia is the destination countries.
While Kalpana manages her six-member family, including two young children, Lalita looks after three older members and a 13-year-old son - all with the help of their husbands' remittances - in makeshift shelters.
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