ABSTRACT
About 3 per cent of the global population consists of migrants (IOM 2009: 37). Every country contributes to this emerging phenomenon by serving as an origin, transit or destination site, or as all three (McKinley 2005: 6, Ahmed 1998: 370, Kusago 1998: 485). The dynamics of human mobility have changed in important ways in the twentieth century (Haque 2004: 7), leading to parallel global policy changes. The shift in contemporary migration dynamics in the Southeast Asian region took root in the mid-1980s, propelled by the ‘miraculous’ growth of several economies of the region. This has reshaped the direction of flow from the Middle East (during the 1970s and early 1980s) to the Southeast Asian region. Malaysia has been one such country where rapid economic growth has led to a shortage of labour, creating the context for large-scale in-migration. This, in turn, created a demand-driven migration policy that led the government to enter into agreements with countries to promote and support the flow of migrant workers to Malaysia. Bangladesh, a labour surplus economy, was one such country. Every year an average of 225,000 Bangladeshis set off for other countries, mostly to the countries of the Middle East (Rahman and Yeoh 2008, BMET, 2009, Yoshimi 2001).1 Since the mid-1980s, however, disillusionment with conditions in the countries of the Middle East, due in part to the Gulf Wars, reported brutality and declining wages, caused the migration stream to partially be redirected to the Southeast and East Asian regions (BMET 2009).
