An unholy competition among overseas employment recruiting agencies is helping to drive up prices for migration, leaving workers destitute at home and vulnerable abroad to exploitation.

A Saudi company has to pay 200 rials to the government for each foreign worker it engages. The companies themselves used to pay the fee, but they later passed the charge on to the recruiting agencies when they saw that the agencies were competing among each other to buy visas for foreign workers.

As a result, Bangladeshi recruiting agents in Middle Eastern countries buy visas from local employers at highly competitive rates, ranging from 600 to 800 rials or Tk 9,000 to 12,000 in the case of the Saudi Kingdom, a managing director (MD) of a recruiting agent said, requesting anonymity.

"This practice of charging fees is not legal according to the Saudi government, but it is a widely exercised open-secret in the country," the MD said.

Employers used to provide visas and airfare to the workers free of cost 10 years ago, but once the sharp competition set in, visa prices began increasing while salaries for workers went down, according to the Welfare Association of Repatriate Bangladeshi Employees (Warbe) and the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU)

The government-fixed rate to migrate to the Middle East is only Tk 70,000, according to official sources. But none of those who go to the Middle East countries pay less than Tk 1.5 to 3 lakh, as has been learnt from a number of recently returned migrant workers.

"It is not only the recruiting agencies that contributed to the visa prices, but also the individuals who buy visas from the companies abroad for their relatives," said the recruiting agency MD. The practice is used apart from the Middle East countries as well, he noted.

The experience of a recruiting agent in Brunei helps substantiate these facts.

MM Rahman, previously the managing director of Madina Overseas Private Ltd, a recruiting agency in Brunei, secured legal documents in 2001. As his first job, he deposited 1,10,000 Singapore dollars or about Tk 36 lakh to Caresan Realty and Management, a local licensed company, for providing 88 Bangladeshi workers.

But at the final stage of the contract process, another Bangladeshi recruiting agency in Brunei illegally made the contract, paying more money with the local company, Rahman told The Daily Star after Brunei immigration officials forcibly sent him home on March 23.

Finding the business unscrupulous, Rahman left the manpower business and opened a department store. "From then on I helped the Bangladeshi workers there and was vocal against the ill practices of the recruiting agencies, for which I became the enemy to other recruiting agencies."

Bangladeshi recruiting agencies, in connivance with the local company, convinced Brunei immigration officials to forcibly send him home, Rahman said.

There are between 10 and 12 recruiting agencies and more than 10,000 Bangladeshi workers in Brunei, but most of the workers are jobless. "Making money is the main target of the agencies, not finding the workers jobs," Rahman said.

Village agents of the recruiting agencies are another component that increases the migration cost.

A former village agent in Kunda, Savar, working on behalf of recruiting agencies in Dhaka, earlier told The Daily Star that there are many agents in the villages who lure prospective migrants with false promises of higher salaries and a brighter future.

"Agents have a contract with the recruiting agencies and take a share of the money. Say I have to pay the agency Tk 1.5 lakh, but I can motivate one to pay Tk 1.75 lakh. I will get Tk 25,000. It depends on the techniques of an agent how much he will profit," the agent, who once was in Saudi Arabia, told The Daily Star in a previously printed interview.

The aspirant migrants never receive any receipts against their payment, which is much more than the government-fixed rate. On the other hand, the village agents exaggerate the salaries and other facilities promised in the contract papers, said Warbe chairman Syed Saiful Haque.

Findings from RMMRU, Warbe and other organisations reveal thousands of cases in which workers paid exorbitant rates to migrate, but returned home after finding no suitable jobs or other facilities.

As reported earlier in The Daily Star, 33 migrants who returned home on January 7, after staying two months in a Riyadh jail in Saudi Arabia, said there are many Bangladeshis languishing in jails throughout the Gulf.