Nobody counts the body

The arithmetic of going abroad is done in money. There is a second column, and almost nobody fills it in.

This week I watched a man decide whether to sell three years of his life, and I learned that I had been arguing the wrong way for years.

He is out of work. He had applied sixteen times and been called twice. Then a circular reached him — a real one, from a real state agency, for real jobs abroad — and he asked me what I thought.

The first thing worth noticing is what he asked for. He did not ask me for money. He asked about a passport, which he had never owned. And out of a whole government circular — wages, terms, deadlines, selection lists — he had kept exactly one phrase, and it was not a wage. It was a job title.

That is the part nobody tells you about labour migration. What is being sold is not work. Work is available at home; it is just badly paid and it carries no rank. What the ticket buys is a change of category — from a man who is at home with nothing to do, to a man who is abroad. In his own country, as he put it, people who sit idle are valued less. That sentence is the whole market.

The first thing that worked was a number

Here is the figure I wish somebody had put in front of me twenty years ago.

Bangladesh has a state recruiting agency whose entire reason for existing is to take the middleman out. On that route, a selected worker pays, at the time of writing, about 1,220 taka — a thousand for the medical, two hundred and twenty for fingerprints. The service charge, the tax, the VAT and the smart card, together roughly 17,750, are the employer's. So is the airfare, both ways.

Read that again, because the entire fraud lives in the gap. The legitimate cost of going abroad to work, for the worker, is about the price of a good meal.

Which produces a rule you can hand to anyone, in one sentence, with no expertise required: anyone asking for lakhs is the fraud. Not might be. Is. There is no version of the honest process in which a worker pays two hundred thousand taka. The state agency publishes that warning itself. It publishes it because in three recent years more than four hundred thousand people were defrauded with forged circulars — documents that looked exactly like the real one he had been sent.

I had also been telling him the true things. That abroad is hard. That the stories people bring home are edited. That I spent seven years working in his country, day and night, with no life of my own, and did not come back rich — I was there for other reasons, and the money was never one of them.

None of that moved him, and I understand why. Everyone has an uncle with a warning. Warnings are free, and they are always given by people who are not the ones without a job. A figure is different. You cannot argue with a man about risk. You can hand him two numbers — 1,220 against two lakh — and let him put them side by side.

The second thing that worked was a face

He had spoken, nine days earlier, to somebody who had gone. That man paid a broker two lakh — three times the entire savings of the man I was talking to — and the work permit never came. He works eleven hours a day and lives carefully out of the way of the police. He did nothing wrong. The broker did, and the broker is still working.

And then he told me the thing neither of us had counted

I had spent a week doing arithmetic for him. Animals, carts, margins, feed, months-to-first-money. Every plan costed to the taka. Every one of them had the same line missing.

One evening, almost in passing, while explaining something else, he mentioned that he had gone out that morning and worked — five hours, from seven until noon, on his own motorbike, because his pocket was empty. He had not thought it worth telling me. It had also put him down; he was still unwell that night.

Asked directly, he described what happens when he works hard without eating and drinking properly. He takes medicine every day. He has a long-standing condition, and a rule he has to keep: eat on time, drink water. At home he keeps it. His mother cooks, the water is there, the doctor knows him.

Now read that against the job he wanted. Eleven hours. Heat. No meals on a schedule. No drinking on a schedule.

And here is the part that deserves to be better known than it is. There is a documented occupational pattern among manual workers in hot climates: repeated dehydration and exertion cause kidney injury that is often subclinical — the worker does not experience it as illness — and that only partially resolves between episodes, accumulating over years into chronic disease. It has been studied in cane cutters in Central America, in farm workers in South Asia, and — this is the line that stopped me — in migrant workers from Nepal in the Gulf. The same corridor. The same jobs.

The trap is the word partially. Between episodes the man feels well. He will tell you, honestly, that he is healthy. That is exactly what he told me: it is fine, as long as I eat and drink.

So the question that decides this is not can you take hard work. He can; he had done five hours of it that morning. The question is whether the one condition he has to keep survives becoming somebody else's employee for eleven hours a day in a country he does not know. At home he controls it. Abroad he would not: you eat what you are given, when you are given it, and you drink when you are allowed to stop.

He got there before I did, in one sentence: if I go, it will be a disaster.

Not you forbade me. Not you were right. His own body had made the decision. He had only just written it down.

The column that is always empty

Every conversation about going abroad is an arithmetic: the fee, the wage, the remittance, the years. I have never once heard anyone ask the second column. What does this work do to the person doing it, and can he afford that?

There is even a crude financial version of the question, for anyone who only hears money. There is a medical examination before departure, and a chronic condition can be found there — while the broker's fee does not come back. But that is the small loss. The large one is that abroad, being ill means not working, and not working means no pay at all — not less, none — while the rent and the food still arrive on time. At home he has people who feed him when he cannot work. That is not a benefit anyone costed, because it has never had a price.

What he decided

Not what I expected, and better than what I had proposed. He will get the passport, and pay for it himself. He will not hand money to a broker under any circumstance. And he is not going.

That is not a heroic decision. It is a sober one, and it is his, which is the only kind that holds.

I had spent that week trying to talk him into staying, with plans built out of research: buy this, rear that, sell one a month. Every one was sound on paper and every one was answered with a local fact I did not have — there is no grazing here, every plot is under tobacco, the shed I already have is a cattle shed. He was right each time. I was seven thousand kilometres away, designing a life for a village I have never walked through.

The thing worth leaving with

Three things moved him, and not one of them was an argument. A figure he could check himself. One real person who had gone. And his own body, which nobody had ever asked him about.

The third is free. It costs one question: what does hard work in heat actually do to you, and what do you need in order to be all right? Anybody can ask it. Almost nobody does, because the conversation is about money.

So if you have somebody in front of you making this decision, do not argue about abroad. You will lose, and you should — you are not the one without work.

Give them the published figure, one real person, and that one question. Then step back, because it is not your life and the decision does not belong to you.

— A.K. · TB Textile Sourcing · Slovenia, EU