Revisiting visit visas

On 3 June I was woken up at 5:30am by a call from a Kuwait-based domestic worker. A common friend had put us in touch.

“Why are you up?” I asked Sharmila, knowing that it was close to 3 AM in Kuwait. She had just got off work. Yet, that was the least of her problems.

It was her first day at this new house, where she had arrived at 9pm. Her previous employer had not been good, so with much difficulty she had been ‘returned’ to the placement office that had brought her to Kuwait.

This time, she was hopeful things would be better. At the placement office, where she waited for three weeks, there were around two dozen ‘khadama’ like her from Nepal and Sri Lanka waiting to get placed in other houses. The Nepalis, she said, had come either on visit visas through the UAE or through India to bypass the ban on domestic workers.

Sharmila herself had come via India. Regardless of which route they came from, they were legal since the Kuwaiti placement office that brought them are legally registered and workers had valid papers.

Meanwhile in Nepal, a ‘visit visa scandal’ has broken. The Centre for Investigation of the Abuse of Authority (CIAA) is investigating immigration officials, among others, over misuse of visit visas to facilitate human trafficking in exchange for big bribes.

There is social media outrage in Nepal’s cybersphere, and calls for Home Minister Ramesh Lekhak’s resignation. That migrant workers travel on visit visas or via irregular routes such as India is well known. That there are ‘settings’ at airports with attached rates so everyone involved can get a cut is also open secret, and has always been.

A primary reason for the misuse of visit visas is the ban on domestic workers. To be sure, there are others who also use visit visas for short-term work since the government does not approve short-term labour permits no matter how lucrative the stint.

Nepalis traveling to countries like the US through unconventional routes, jobseekers keen to find employment in the destination country itself, or by recruiters who want to circumvent legal safeguards or because there are delays in paperwork.

The misuse of visit visas under the guise of tourism is a consequence of restrictive policies like the domestic worker ban ostensibly to protect them from abuse. And when there are massive profits involved, there is also little incentive to change. Persistent bans on overseas household work have lasted despite failure to contain migrants, and the unintended but predictable risks they put outgoing workers in.

In the government’s eyes, someone like Sharmila is non-existent as a migrant because she did not receive labour approval. Her agent is non-existent because she did not travel through a vetted recruitment agency in Nepal. Her employer is non-existent because they did not have to get the ‘demand’ attested at the Nepal Embassy.

All these details would have been well-documented had domestic workers been able to migrate regularly. Domestic or care work is already an invisible sector and the ban puts workers even more at risk from exploitation and abuse.

Meanwhile complicit recruiters and employers get a pass without any accountability. Only vetted recruiters who meet criteria that are stricter than that for regular worker recruitment should be allowed to arrange jobs abroad for domestic workers. Sharmila relied on an unauthorised individual agent who she never met in person, and who did not even turn on his camera when they had video calls.

The ban not only means that workers leave through irregular channels many are also inexperienced and unprepared. Talk to any domestic worker, especially new ones, and they will tell you how the first few months are the hardest. Modern home appliances are foreign to them and there are language barriers. As per the law, domestic workers have to go through mandatory training specifically designed for them which they are deprived of because of the ban.

“I have never taken care of babies in my life,” Sharmila said on the phone. “How will I take care of the children here?”

Women’s access to jobs, both in Nepal and overseas, needs attention. Sharmila, for example, said that she could not afford the Rs200,000 that was demanded for a cleaning job in the UAE. As an orphan, no one wanted to give her loans even at high interest rates. For her job as a domestic worker in Kuwait, she did not have to pay any fee.

Many migrants land good homes, and they do not look at the agents as villains but as enablers who helped them bypass the ban. How else would they be employed and provide for their families? A bad migration episode does not deter many from retrying their luck again through irregular channels.

Instead of the ban, more concerted, proactive efforts to manage this highly vulnerable sector rife with abuse are needed via stronger embassies, bilateral labor agreements, monitoring, pre-departure training and awareness campaigns, Regular communication, as well as alternate jobs both domestically and overseas.

This problem is not unique to Nepal. Sri Lanka’s restrictive policies on emigration has encouraged informal and illegal activities involving lower-skilled female migrant workers because they have to circumvent the policy. This has led to higher exposure to recruitment related vulnerabilities and corruption.

In a former diaspora-run paper called Sahayatra, UAE-based Dalbir Singh captured in 2007 the views of many UAE-based migrants regarding the government ban on domestic workers. Migrants had a similar view: that domestic work sector should not be banned given that it puts workers in more vulnerability, but more protection is needed given the vulnerabilities in the sector.

The article noted that a river should not be blocked just because it floods. It was known 18 years ago and even earlier that bans do not protect domestic workers, and there is a long history of flip-flopping between bans of various kinds.

The last one was put in place in 2017 after a Parliamentary committee visited the Gulf and decided it was unsafe for domestic workers, regardless of gender. After a similar 2020 trip, the committee instructed the government to revisit the ban considering country-specific policies and several preconditions, which were still deemed restrictive, but better than previous rules. Implementation has been weak despite the proposal around lifting the ban starting with a pilot agreement with the UAE.

Will the latest ’visit visa scandal’ lead to constructive discussions around how to manage emigration better? Or will it just lead to a further clamp down on visit visa misuse by proposing bizarre alternates as has been done in the past? The most recent proposal that got quashed, for example, included a requirement to get "written consent from the guardian and local government for women under 40 to travel to the gulf and Africa.”

For Nepali youth with a preference for overseas jobs, there are enough vacancies and unfilled jobs in the world. They do not have to be compelled to become fake visitors, seek backdoor entry as students, rely on unauthorised agents, or even fight wars.

But for that we need to prioritise regular, safe pathways and responsible employers, and not create bottlenecks in the name of protection.

BANNING and UNBANNING

Timeline of Nepal regulations on overseas household work

1985-1995

> Consent required from a guardian to go for foreign employment.

1995-2000

> Women permitted to go for foreign employment in certain organised sectors (1997)

> Ban on labour migration for women (1998)

2000-2005

> Conditional ban provided women obtains security guarantee from Nepal’s diplomatic missions in countries outside the Gulf (2000)

> Reapproval needed after visiting Nepal (2003)

> Letter of approval from local governments and family members (2003)

> Foreign employment for females in organised sector in Malaysia opened (2005) 

2005-2010

> Restrictions on female migrants to work in organised sector lifted (2007-2008)

> Complete ban on domestic workers to Lebanon (2009)

> Ban lifted for women to go to Gulf countries.

2010-2015

> Women allowed to migrate to any country including as domestic workers with a government target of 150,000 female migrants, mostly to Gulf countries (2011)

> Age ban for women domestic workers less than 30 years to work in Gulf countries (2012)

> Temporary ban on domestic workers in Gulf countries (20-14)

> Age ban for women under 25 for domestic workers in Gulf countries (2015)

2015-2020 

> Women above 24 allowed for domestic work through select recruitment agencies if a separate bilateral agreement is signed (2016)

> Ban on domestic workers after field visit by Parliament Committee (2017)

> Ban lifted for current domestic workers to visit Nepal during holidays and remigrate (2019)

> Parliament committee recommends country-specific approach instead of blanket ban (2020)