Living and leaving

“गरि खान देउ” is a compelling collective call that resonates with most Nepalis. It reflects the suffocation of people wanting just to live and get by. In relation to foreign employment, it also means that because it is difficult to live, Nepalis leave. 

The Nepal government should be evaluated more than on its ability to retain youth within Nepal. Its ability to ensure that those who choose to migrate have access to safe, transformative, well-managed migration pathways that provide high return opportunities without high costs and hassles.

In the context of foreign employment, “गरि खान देउ extends to “गरि जान देउ” which would mean ‘Let us leave to live’. This is particularly pertinent now because our international labour market is so shaky. Because access to Nepal’s biggest migrant destinations are in jeopardy, labour diplomacy that puts workers at the centre is now more important than ever.

Malaysia had been closed for almost two years, and it recently issued a ten-point list for recruitment agencies that seems to favour the better endowed recruiters while displacing smaller ones that care about worker welfare and recruitment standards.

After the GenZ protests, the UAE stopped issuing visas to Nepali workers for almost two months, ostensibly because of jailbreaks and looted weapons. They have reportedly begun allowing it recently, pending attested police reports.

While the preference of Nepali youth may be shifting toward Europe, in terms of scale and accessibility especially for those with low education, limited English skills, or little work experience, traditional destinations in the Gulf and Malaysia are crucial and continue to make up a major share of overall migration.

Disturbances in these common destination markets can mean loss of livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Nepalis. 

Nepali migrant workers want to live and just get by not only in Nepal but overseas as well.

But the way many leave for work abroad can be considered ‘compromised migration’. Sub-par outcomes that migrants are often compelled to settle for due to lack of alternate choices both within Nepal and overseas. The lack of choices abroad  is not necessarily the absence of rewarding options globally, where there are severe worker shortages and unfulfilled vacancies, but rather our inability to seize those opportunities.

The Japan Specified Skilled Worker scheme, for example, is an underutilised migrant labour pathway due to lack of procedural clarity. Although the agreement was signed in 2019, it is only from October that verification of job demands has begun. Nepalis do not need to look for a backdoor as students or trainees if they are interested to work in Japan, because Tokyo has literally opened the front door and designed a work scheme to address labor shortages. With the new leadership in Japan, there might be changes in how the intake of foreign workers is managed.

Where it has worked, like with the Employment Permit Scheme (EPS) for South Korea, there have been stories of transformation. There are pilot innovations for Nepali workers in Korea, including for their reintegration back in Nepal. Would the Korea EPS have worked as well had Seoul not held its presence in Nepal to manage this scheme via the Human Resources Development Service of Korea?

When Alpana Adhikari migrated to the UK , she knew exactly why. Her son was diagnosed with Williams Syndrome and she wanted better education facilities for him. In 20 months, she realised the dream. She migrated under a well-designed government-to-government (G2G) pilot initiative that did not require her to pay any fees and offered transparent terms of employment. 

Imagine if she had migrated like a majority of other Nepali nurses do — paying exorbitant recruitment fees, expensive license tests, visa delays, unnecessary time and financial costs through ‘consultancies’ which may find ways to cheat.

Just like many migrants’ stories, hers too could have been a story of deferred dreams. She may still have been able to accomplish what she had desired, but perhaps not so soon or as easily. 

The G2G pilot was for a quota of 100, but only 40 managed to meet the criteria. The 60 wasted opportunities did not raise eyebrows, not even when our reality is that many who failed to secure a seat through the G2G still managed to migrate through traditional ways, including to the UK.

With or without well-executed labour mobility schemes, people still migrate and gain from it. Because migrating, despite the costs, hassles and struggle, still allow for earnings that are relatively better and regular. People want to move to new places, learn new things, grow, see the world, and as many migrants say they want to “work within a system”.

But ‘better’ is a relative term, the outcomes may be better than what people leave behind in Nepal, but may not be as good as they could be in the global labour market if we had access to better implemented bilateral labor partnerships and a more competent and honest labor mobility industry. We are not making the most of overseas employment, not at an individual or a national level.

This is an area where our public narrative and how we evaluate the Government’s migration management also fall short. Both the Japan SSW scheme and the UK pilot show how wasted opportunities don’t raise alarm even when people seek similar jobs through alternate, more costly and time-consuming, routes.

Hundreds of thousands of workers migrate to Gulf countries and Malaysia but the outcomes can differ vastly depending on the employer. There are differences in recruitment fees, career growth, remittances sent, living and working conditions including safety standards, among others. Working in a multinational company is not the same as working in a supply company, so dismissing the Gulf countries as one homogenous experience overlooks these distinctions.

Nepalis are willing to invest in language training such as Korean for better schemes like EPS when there is trust in the benefits and process. Such investment in skills prior to departure can yield multifold returns.

Evidence shows that a good share of Nepal’s poverty reduction can be attributed to remittances. And this is despite remittances coming from recruitment that involves high cost, skill mismatch, limited choice of good employers or decent jobs, weak labour diplomacy, and a failure to attract top employers.

Fixing the foreign employment sector need not be at odds with fixing the domestic labour market. When the Nepali diaspora does well, Nepal does well. When one member has access to a good overseas opportunity, 10 members fare well back home. Remittances far outperform other external financing like FDI and foreign aid, are more resilient and directly reach the pockets of families. 

Inclusive jobs and employment as social protection via public works programs remain central to our domestic labour priorities. But we should be thinking about inclusive labour mobility programs in a similar way to help the poorest pockets.

Nepal should be attracting the best of employers, diversifying to new destination countries and sectors with better worker protections and higher earnings. Broad, non-binding MOUs should be treated not as an end point, but as the start of further diplomacy and collaboration on skills and labour mobility schemes.

People leave and will continue to leave in the hundreds of thousands. But where to? How? For what kind of jobs? What are the returns of these jobs? At what cost? And what safety protections are in place?

Despite the possibilities for better life outcomes that migration offers, why are there no active demands from the public for good emigration? Immigration is a politically divisive topic in many migrant receiving countries. In Nepal the duress to leave (बाध्यता) has become part of our public narrative but the compulsion to choose less rewarding overseas opportunities by migrants has not.

Even the new faces, new voices that have emerged after the GenZ protests refer to migration largely as an outcome of state failure, a problem that needs to be solved. This is not surprising because people are leaving and villages are emptying. Such perceptions are not baseless, but are rooted in many stories of abuse that migrants face overseas.

Without romanticising बिदेश or legitimizing the struggles workers face overseas, migration has enabled transformation for countless Nepalis who did not want to be confined by circumstances of birth. 

Considering youth aspiration, the demographic shift that have expanded temporary labour programs globally, and the immense power of the Nepali diaspora waiting to be unlocked, “गरि खान देउ” should have a beyond border outlook. If not for more migration, certainly for better migration.

Upasana Khadka heads Migration Lab, a social enterprise aimed at making migration outcomes better for workers and their families. Labour Mobility is a regular column in Nepali Times.