Seminar Summary
February 13-15, 2003
Bangkok, Thailand
Day 3, Feb. 15
What Awaits Returning Workers at Home?
There are about half a million Bangladeshi workers who return home each year. Not all of them, though face a bright future, said Masud Parvez of the Welfare Association of Returning Bangladeshi Employees (WARBE).
The joy and excitement of being reunited with family members and returning to a familiar environment often turn to despair because of the circumstances they find at home, he said. Oftentimes, these workers are penniless, no new job prospects, directionless, and sometimes without family.
"Reintegration is a problem," he said.
These workers, majority of them males, have no savings as most of their earnings were sent to their families, who either invested them in the wrong business or spent them unwisely. Because they lack proper education, they have difficulty finding jobs at home.
These workers also find it difficult to adjust and adapt to their old environment, especially so in their own homes as the children hardly know them and a gap now exists between them and their spouses, Parvez explained. In worse situations, a worker's wife runs away with another man, leaving the children behind.
Those who cannot endure the suffering kill themselves, he said, adding that an average one suicide a week has been reported.
"The fate of returning workers in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal is almost similar. Very few utilise their earnings (properly) and become successful," he said.
WARBE is trying to address the problem by helping Bangladeshi migrant workers in distress and counselling others to be more prudent in the way they handle their finances. Working at the grassroots level, they also counsel the families of the workers.
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Duangchan Yasri recounted her experience as an undocumented worker in Japan for five years in the early 1980s, and the difficulties of returning to her family and re-integrating into her community in Thailand's northern province of Chiang Rai.
Lured by the promise of a decent job overseas, she left sex work in Bangkok and flew to Japan on falsified papers (she was 15) arranged for her by her broker. She ended up in a snack bar and was forced to again be a sex worker. She managed to escape from her workplace after several months and sought refuge in a friend's place. She later met a Japanese man with whom she lived and had a child.
The couple returned to Thailand with the intention of marrying and getting Thai citizenship for her daughter. To her horror, the process was not that simple. Being on a visitor's visa, her Japanese boyfriend was forced to return to Japan without her and their daughter. After two months, the man stopped communicating, though she waited and hoped one day they would be reunited.
"Everybody loved me when I first returned with a lot of money," Duangchan explained. "Relatives and friends usually visited me, and many came asking for financial help, which it seemed I was not allowed to reject."
When her money ran out, she was confronted with reality: she had no job and little prospects of landing one as she had no experience or training. Meanwhile, she ran up debts to work on her daughter's papers, with little success until now. But many still think it is not possible for her not to have money.
She said: "I think of it also as my fault that I didn't tell my family earlier how much I suffered in Japan. In the letters I wrote home, I usually told them that I was okay. When I now tell them the truth, they think it is only my excuse for not able to make any more money for them."
Some returning workers who are not able to cope with the situation often turn to alcohol and drugs. She was not spared this desperation. "I tried to commit suicide for many times, but thinking about my children was the only thing that pulled me back," added Duangchan, now 43.
She is now married to a Thai man with whom she has three children, but said "his family is not happy with me who they see as a bad woman that used to work as a sex worker".
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Media and Migration
The media's coverage of migration issues tends to be negative and sensational, lacking the sensitivity and depth that would enable readers to relate to and understand the situation these workers are in. The result is a stereotyping of workers as either illiterate, greedy, loose women, and other negative traits.
"We need to expose the hidden problems of migrant workers to the people. We need to get it out of the dark," said Sanitsuda Ekachai, editor and columnist of the 'Bangkok Post'.
From her experience, she said the better outlet for such stories is the features section of a newspaper. There is fierce competition for space in the news section, she points out. "The little space you get is not enough to tell a meaningful story."
Thailand, which itself exports labour to other parts of Asia and the Middle East, also plays host to migrant workers mostly from Burma, and some from Laos and Cambodia. One of the main problems of migrant workers in Thailand is racism and ethnic prejudice, she said.
"In Thailand," Sanitsuda said, "we have come to view Burmese migrant workers not only as carrier of diseases but criminals. This is the result of constant prejudicial headlines which often put the blame on the ethnic group, exacerbating the Thais' already deep prejudice against them."
In a critique of the industry, she said media, which ideally should transcend such prejudice and help promote understanding of the root cause of the problem is sometimes guilty of "perpetuating or even fanning those prejudices".
In order to help counter the prejudice, she suggested that writers can pursue stories that could create an open environment to question what she called 'ultra-nationalism' constructively.
"Since prejudice is an emotion, it cannot be changed by hard information. We might have a better chance to question this prejudice if our story can trigger other forms of more powerful emotions such as sympathy and compassion," Sanitsuda said.
Media, she said, is "pushed and pulled between so many obligations, so many causes" and that despite its best efforts, problems seem to get worse.
Following this line of thought, there was some debate among the participants as to the role of media: should it be a forum to rally a cause or should it keep its objectivity and merely inform its readers without making any value judgement on issues.
Deep, of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women expressed dismay at media's alleged lack of sensitivity and support to say, human rights or other causes NGOs espouse, while journalists took issue against some NGOs' lack of understanding of how media operates.
The journalists said a newspaper or any media outlet, though it has a responsibility to inform the public, is a business enterprise first and foremost.
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Dr Michael Tan chaired the last session, talking about Philippine media's coverage of migration by showing actual articles about migrant workers and HIV/AIDS. Reportage around HIV/AIDS is difficult because it is a sensitive issue, he noted.
A headline such as 'HIV Risks Higher for OFW,' looks neutral on the surface, but without adequate context, he explained, could give rise to different interpretations by the readers.
'Coconut Oil a Cure for AIDS?' is another example of an inaccurate and misleading headline. Tan said in a recent national Philippine survey. 1/3 of respondents believed there was a cure for AIDS, which is not surprising because of the newspapers stories they read.
Singling out overseas workers as a group with HIV infections stigmatises these workers as carriers of disease. "The imagery reinforces prejudices," he said. "If mass media continue to amplify these misconceptions, they add to the problem."
