Southeast Asia sub-region is home to around 650 millionpeople living in 11 countries: Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor (Timor-Leste),Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, Singapore,Thailand, and Vietnam.
Debt, a primary cause to migrate
The findings of the study Debt and the Migration Experience:Insights from Southeast Asia tells that debt is often a “primary cause” ofmigration.
“With households routinely taking on debt to cope with acutecrises such as illness and failed crops, the growth and availability of formalloans offered by banks and micro-finance institutions in rural areas iscontributing to changing borrowing patterns and an increased burden of debtamong low-income households.”
In some contexts, loans undertaken can be far greater thanaverage income, and migration is increasingly seen as a coping strategy inresponse to debt stress. “In Cambodia, for example, over 40 per cent of ruralremittance-receiving households report repayment of debt as the main use of remittances.”
Meantime, migrants also take on debt to fund their journeys,IOM explains, adding that the increasing cost of migration and recruitment inthe region, often taken on by employees, causes prospective migrants to borrowheavily in order to cover the cost of recruitment. Full repayment of theseloans can take anywhere from months to years.
In addition, debt undertaken by migrants to gain legalstatus or extend their stay legally has been flagged as a particular area ofconcern. “The unpredictable legal costs in countries of destination make itdifficult for migrants to anticipate them. This subsequently causes them toresort to loans and take on a higher burden of debt,” adds the report.
The findings are based on qualitative interviews conductedthroughout 2018 with current and returned migrants in Cambodia, Myanmar andThailand, as well as survey data collected by IOM and the International LabourOrganization (ILO).
Exposed, exploited, discriminated
The International Organization for Migration concludes thatthere is a “strong link between indebtedness and increased vulnerability totrafficking and related exploitation.” Reason: migrants in debt are more likelyto make potentially risky choices, often choosing to remain in jobs with poorworking conditions, while wage deductions used by employers to coverrecruitment costs can also inhibit workers from changing jobs or leaving.
Meanwhile “debt contributes to negative economic, social andpsychosocial outcomes when migrants returned home. Indebted migrants were morelikely to encounter financial insecurity due to a lack of savings, strugglingbusinesses and difficulties in finding decent work.”
In addition to reduced financial status, the study finds thatindebted returnees also reported social and psychological problems, includingshame, embarrassment and discrimination in their communities, as well asharassment and violence from lenders. “These pressures subsequently providedstrong incentives for them and their families to migrate again.”
In short, the 2019 Debt and the Migration Experience:Insights from Southeast Asia study underlines the very fact that debt andindebtedness are central to the lives of migrants from this Asian sub-region.And that indebtedness can motivate the need for migration and, conversely,migrants regularly use loans to finance costly cross-border moves.
It also strongly emphasises the key facts that theremittances that migrants then send home are often used to repay householddebt.
The wider picture
Being part of the big Asia-Pacific region, South-East Asia–also known as the Greater Mekong sub-region- appears to be among the mostimpacted by poor, informal and vulnerable working conditions.
On this, the International Labour Organization’s reportAsia-Pacific Employment and Social Outlook 2018 sheds light on the labourmarket challenges facing this big region, considered the most populous of theworld.
According to the report’s first edition, although theregional unemployment rate is projected to remain at 4.1 per cent through 2020,the vulnerable employment rate is expected to creep up towards 49 per cent,reversing a downward trend of at least two decades.
While the Asia-Pacific region has made rapid progress tosubstantially reduce extreme poverty, one fourth of all workers in the region –446 million workers – still lived in “moderate or extreme poverty” in 2017 and”nearly half of the workforce – 930 million people – were still making a livingin vulnerable employment as own-account or unpaid contributing family workers.”
The ILO report informs that high employment ratios andproductivity gains in the region mask persistent and worrying decent workdeficits.
“Many people, in particular in the region’s developingeconomies, still have no choice but to take jobs with poor working conditionsthat do not generate stable incomes nor safeguard them and their familiesagainst poverty in the longer term,” says Sara Elder, the lead author of thereport and Head of the ILO Regional Economic and Social Analysis unit.
“What is especially frustrating here is that despite theregion’s important economic gains, there are still so many workers just barelygetting by. Any household crisis – injury or death of a breadwinner, loss ofjob, natural disaster, crop failure, etc. – threatens to push them backwardsinto poverty.”
Informal, low-paid or even unpaid jobs
While in the Asia and the Pacific region more than 2 in 3workers were in informal employment in 2016 –which is closely linked to the 48.6per cent of workers still in vulnerable categories of employment– the informalemployment rate is particularly high in Southern Asia, where almost 88 per centof workers were informally employed.
Also while large numbers of workers in the Asia-Pacific region,especially those in low-paid jobs, work more than 48 hours per week, theaverage hours worked in Southern Asia and Eastern Asia in 2017 were the world’shighest, at 46.4 and 46.3 hours per week, respectively.
In other words, tens of millions of human beings who havebeen impoverished, find themselves forced to borrow, migrate to pay back theirdebts, be exploited, detained, persecuted, trafficked, trapped behind fencesand walls, obliged to return and to be strangled by lenders, while sociallyshamed and discriminated in their own societies.
Most probably none of the new xenophobe, supremacist,populist politicians who are more and more on the rise in the US and Europewould want to hear a word about this hidden side of migration.
And even if they did, they would just ignore such aninhumane reality, continue with their inflammatory speeches, feeding irrationalfears, spreading hate sentiments in their citizens through indiscriminatelydemonising all migrants… for the sake of winning elections.
Wouldn’t it be wiser, human and rational to stand againstthat fact that the world military expenditure grew to 1.8 trillion dollars in2018?
Even for purely selfish motivations, wouldn’t this hugeamount of tax-payers’ money which is spent on producing killing machines, bebest devoted to alleviate the incalculable consequences of climate change? Onesuch consequence would be that climate migrants might reach one billion by2050!
ABRIDGED
TRANSCEND Media Service