The stories Bengali migrants told on a rescue ship in the Mediterranean

Since 2017, Bengali migrants have regularly ranked in the top nationalities to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, considered one of the most dangerous in the world. 

In the first trimester of 2024, they represented the third-most common nationality to make the crossing, after Mali and Senegal.

InfoMigrants joined a sea rescue mission aboard Emergency NGO’s Life Support search-and-rescue vessel in March. The vast majority of migrants rescued on the trip – around 60 of 71 – were Bengali.

In interviews, these mostly male, mostly young migrants, told InfoMigrants they came to Libya for work or with the aim of crossing the sea. They said they made contact with smugglers in Libya, then took flights with stopovers in countries like Dubai and Egypt. 

Stories of migration can involve – sometimes multiple – smokescreens impeding anyone’s ability to understand what truly happened on individual journeys. 

Language barriers make interviews difficult to conduct, and most of the individuals have no documentation of their journey or the tales they describe. 

Even if these points were easy to verify, it is currently impossible to enter a Libyan migrant prison, for example, as a journalist. 

On the ship, three Bengali migrants told InfoMigrants three stories of how they wound up on a white fiberglass boat with a broken motor in the Maltese SAR zone in mid-March. These stories are impossible to verify, but offer insight into Bengali paths across the Mediterranean, and the infrastructure that guides these individual journeys. 

Read more: Lost at sea: New constraints hinder Mediterranean rescuers

Work in Libya

Karim*, a 21-year-old from Dhaka, said he traveled to Libya for a job. He contacted an agency in Bangladesh via WhatsApp that booked him a flight to Libya, complete with a visa. He had a stopover in Dubai, then flew to Tobruk. He paid 3,000 dollars for the trip. 

This is common, said Anas Ansar, a research associate at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn in Germany. A graduate of the University of Dhaka, he works specifically on migration from Bangladesh.

Ansar explained that the topic of migration is omnipresent in Bangladesh on social media sites like Facebook and WhatsApp. These sites are used for two purposes: first, to receive information about migration paths to Europe, and second, to communicate with smugglers. 

“They don’t necessarily even meet in person,” Ansar said, referring to the migrants and the individuals who set them on their paths. “It all happens through social media… so it’s very difficult to even cross-check information.”

This is beneficial for the smugglers, who do not want to be traced.

Ansar said there are “hundreds of thousands” of social media pages on Facebook and Youtube devoted to sharing information on migration. These pages, he said, are rife with disinformation in the Bengali language.

He said these sites often feature influencers who successfully made the journey from Bangladesh to Europe. These are often men in relationships with European women. Young people in Bangladesh follow these influencers, he said, and think: ‘If he can do it, why can’t I?’

“If you go to Bangladesh and talk to these young people, they will just talk about those couples,” he said.

The algorithms and artificial intelligence used by the companies that own these social media sites often do not have fact-checking or disinformation programs that work effectively in the Bengali language. 

That means “this whole apparatus of free flow of false and unverified information is going unchecked,” Ansar said. “And people believe what they want to believe.”

‘A story’

From Tobruk, Karim told InfoMigrants he traveled to Tripoli, where he began his work in a supermarket. There, he said he worked with other migrants from countries like Nigeria and Egypt. After six months, he didn’t receive any payment.

His employers had also taken his passport, he said. “I can’t go back to my country, to Bangladesh. That’s why I came here [on the boat across the Mediterranean]. I know this is very dangerous. I don’t have any other option.”

Mahmud*, a 19-year-old from Dhaka, told InfoMigrants a similar story: He flew from his home city to Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, to Alexandria in Egypt, to Benghazi, Libya. From there, he traveled to Tripoli. He said he paid 9,000 dollars for the journey. 

In Libya, he said he worked for two months in a factory making fabric bags, but also did not receive a paycheck. When he asked for one, he said, his employers tortured him. They kept telling him they would pay him, he said, but never did. 

Read more: Bangladeshi migrants in Romania: From regular to undocumented (Part 1 of 2)

Ansar said it is unlikely these stories are entirely true. Bengalis looking for work abroad know that Libya’s economic, social and political situation has been deteriorating since the 2011 fall of Muammar Gaddafi, he said, and therefore are far more likely to seek work opportunities in the Gulf states. 

“The destination is Europe, the destination is not Libya. They know that very well. But to make their case picture perfect, they add up these layers of smuggling, trafficking, exploitation, because it strengthens your case to seek asylum in the end.”

He said it is likely their smugglers coached them to tell these stories upon arrival to better their chances of receiving international protection.

Francesco Della Puppa, a professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice whose research focuses specifically on Bengali migration to Europe, also noted that although it is very possible the migrants’ passports were taken while working in Libya, it is unlikely they did not know this could happen. 

This practice is well-known among prospective migrant laborers in Bangladesh, said Della Puppa. It doesn’t just happen in Libya, he said, but also in the Gulf countries where Bengali laborers frequently go to work, like Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. It is a way for the employers to exert control and prevent migrants from leaving their positions for a different employer. Although it is exploitative, it is something migrants are aware of, he told InfoMigrants. 

Read more: ‘The system is broken’: Inside an Italian reception center in Sicily

But that doesn’t mean Bengali migrants coast through Libya to Europe with no problems or that all of their stories of abuse and exploitation are untrue. 

Sometimes, Della Puppa said, Bangladeshi migrants really do come to Libya to work and are kidnapped by smugglers, who call their families demanding payment for their release. These individuals find themselves and their families in such deep debt that the sea crossing to Europe appears as their only option, for example.

And on the Life Support ship, multiple Bengali migrants showed InfoMigrants bruises and scars they said they had received after beatings in the Libyan prisons. One migrant showed a broken finger. 

Expensive trips

Another migrant InfoMigrants spoke with, a 44-year-old named Rahman*, told InfoMigrants he worked in a hotel restaurant in Dhaka, where he made around 200 dollars a month. The costs for his son’s school, he said, took up half of that, leaving the family of four with around 100 dollars per month to live on. He said he also has to support his mother, father and siblings.

Rahman said he sold property and family gold to pay the 5,000 dollars requested by the smugglers to travel from Bangladesh to the coasts of Libya and board the boat. But how did Mahmud and Karim, men younger than 22, come across the thousands of dollars needed to pay the smugglers to cross the sea?

“Migration has long been kind of like a household strategy,” said Ansar. “For people in Bangladesh … household strategy means all the family members will help one person who has the most potential to make it to the destination, so that later on there can be a chain migration – so he will bring one after another one after another.”

Typically in Bangladesh, Ansar said, “people won’t give you money.” But if you ask for money to migrate abroad, he said, you will likely get it, because family members believe you are going to a rich country and therefore will be able to easily pay back your debts.

Life in the shadows

Bengali requests for asylum in Europe are rarely accepted. For years, just 5 percent of these applications have been approved, according to the European Union Agency for Asylum. 

Regardless, when the Bengali migrants who have managed to cross the sea arrive in Italy (the most common country of arrival), they apply. While they wait for their applications to process, they are given an asylum seeker residence permit, which allows them to stay in migrant reception facilities.

While they are living in these facilities in a state of limbo, they are able to take Italian classes and work. Della Puppa told InfoMigrants that these individuals very often find jobs in Italy’s “shadow economy” – undocumented work. Unlike in northern European countries, “in the south of Europe, it is a structural part of the labor market. It’s almost normal, especially in some sectors like restaurants, or hotels,” he said.

These workers, who have no rights, are very profitable for employers, Della Puppa said, explaining that many work in fields like agriculture for around two euros per hour. 

Read more: Italy: Asylum seekers exploited as field laborers, three arrests

While they are working in these positions, they might receive a negative asylum decision. But they can appeal it, which grants them more time with an official residence permit. 

When multiple appeals are rejected, a point will come where the migrants are no longer able to ask for their cases to be reexamined. They may receive a notice they need to be pushed back to Bangladesh. But the chances of this actually happening are slim to none, said Della Puppa, because mass repatriations would be too expensive for the Italian government. 

He said these flights only happen rarely, and largely only to send a message to the other migrants in Italy that they could be deported. 

“The police know there are undocumented migrants, but they don’t care,” said Della Puppa. “We know that there are a lot of migrants but we also know … the local economy needs them, so they don’t spend the money to send them back.”

According to Eurostat data, in both 2021 and 2022, fewer than 2,000 Bengali migrants were deported from the EU.

That’s despite the fact that in 2021, over 10,000 were given an order to leave the bloc, and more than 15,000 in 2022. 

“You will live in exploitation, you will live without rights, you will live in informal camps or you will live sharing a small house with many, many people,” said Della Puppa. “But it’s very difficult that people will be pushed back because it’s not feasible. There are too many of them. It’s a huge cost.”

Read more: About 3,400 Bangladeshi migrants regularized in Greece in 2023

*Names have been changed to protect the migrants’ privacy