Understanding South Asian Labour Migration: Key Trends and Challenges

Every year, millions of workers from South Asia pack their bags for jobs abroad – laying bricks in Riyadh, assembling electronics in Penang, working in fields in Gyeonggi, or cleaning homes in Dubai. South Asian labour migration is one of the largest movements of workers in the world, and its patterns, problems, and policy gaps shape the lives of households from Kerala to Kathmandu. Understanding its features helps make sense of remittance economies, migrant rights debates, and why governments in the region keep returning to the same unresolved questions.

What makes South Asian labour migration distinct 🔗

Labour migration from South Asia – primarily from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – has a few defining features. It is overwhelmingly temporary and contract-based, dominated by low- and semi-skilled workers, and heavily concentrated in a few destination corridors. According to the International Labour Organization, over 76 per cent of South Asian nationals living outside their countries in 2017 were residing outside the subregion, particularly in Western Asia, Western Europe, North America, and South-East Asia. This makes South Asia unusual: unlike Southeast Asia, where intra-regional migration is large, South Asians have historically looked outward, especially to the Gulf.

The post-1973 oil boom in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries triggered massive demand for construction, services, and domestic workers, and South Asia became the primary supplier. Decades later, that corridor remains the largest in the Global South. The migration corridor between South Asia and the Middle East grew from 8.4 million migrants in 1990 to roughly 21.5 million in 2020, making it the single biggest migration route in the Global South.

The shift from Middle East to intra-Asian destinations 🔗

While the Gulf still dominates, the destination map has been slowly redrawing. Other parts of Asia – especially Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and increasingly Japan – have become important employers of South Asian workers. This shift is driven by two forces: rising labour costs and ageing populations in East Asia, and the gradual saturation (plus periodic political volatility) of Gulf labour markets.

Malaysia and Singapore as regional magnets 🔗

Malaysia and Singapore began absorbing South and Southeast Asian workers in the 1980s and 1990s as their economies industrialised. As the Policy and Society journal notes, Singapore and Malaysia experienced acute labour shortages after the oil shocks and became attractive destinations for regional temporary labour movements. Bangladeshi, Nepali, and Indian workers fill jobs in plantations, construction, electronics manufacturing, and domestic service – sectors that local populations are unwilling to take up.

South Korea’s Employment Permit System 🔗

South Korea presents an interesting alternative model. Launched in 2004, its Employment Permit System (EPS) is a government-to-government scheme that recruits workers from partner countries – including Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – for jobs in manufacturing, agriculture, fisheries, and services. EPS workers can stay up to 4 years and 10 months, are covered by national health insurance and accident compensation, and avoid the high recruitment fees typical of private agents. The system has reduced costs sharply: average recruitment costs fell from around USD 3,500 before EPS to under USD 1,000 in 2014, according to the World Bank.

Japan is following a similar path. The IOM reports that Bangladesh has set up 30 technical training centres offering Japanese language and vocational training to youth, signalling a deliberate diversification away from Gulf-only migration. Ageing destinations and youthful sending countries are creating new corridors that may reshape South Asian migration over the next two decades.

The challenges of migrant protection 🔗

The economic gains of migration – remittances form a major share of GDP for Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka – sit alongside serious protection gaps. Low- and semi-skilled migrants face risks at every stage: recruitment, transit, employment, and return.

Irregular migration and recruitment fraud 🔗

Many South Asian workers reach their destinations through irregular channels – overstaying visas, using fraudulent documents, or being trafficked. A thriving private recruitment industry, often weakly regulated, charges fees that push workers into debt before they even leave home. The ASEAN-Australia Counter Trafficking programme highlights that the majority of migrant workers in Southeast Asia rely on irregular channels because regular routes are slow, expensive, and bureaucratically complex. Indebtedness is a key driver: many households send a family member abroad specifically to pay off accumulated loans, which makes workers reluctant to leave abusive employers.

Trafficking and exploitation 🔗

Trafficking is a serious and persistent problem in the region. Women and children are trafficked from Bangladesh and Nepal to India, Pakistan, and onwards to the Gulf, often into domestic work, construction, or commercial sexual exploitation. A study in Development in Practice on the South-West Asia corridor found that women migrant domestic workers face exploitation at every step – coercive recruiters, debt bondage, withheld wages, mobility restrictions, and physical abuse. Some sending governments, including Nepal and Sri Lanka, have responded with migration bans on women going to certain destinations, but evidence suggests such bans often push women into informal and even riskier channels.

Weak legal protection at destination 🔗

Destination-country laws frequently favour employers. As the Migration Data Portal notes, rising demand for domestic workers in the Middle East and Asia has dramatically increased the number of women migrants in vulnerable, lightly regulated sectors. Domestic workers are often excluded from standard labour protections, leaving them isolated inside private homes with little recourse against abuse.

Circular migration and the Gulf model 🔗

The Gulf corridor is built on circular migration – workers go for fixed contracts, return home, and often migrate again on a fresh contract. This cycle is not accidental; it is the deliberate design of the kafala (sponsorship) system, which has shaped the Gulf labour market for decades.

How the kafala system works 🔗

Under kafala, a migrant worker’s residence and employment are legally tied to a single employer (the kafeel) for the duration of the contract. As documented widely, the worker cannot change jobs, leave the country, or in some cases even open a bank account without the sponsor’s consent. The system creates a stark power imbalance. The Brookings Institution describes how kafala fosters a legal environment in which sponsors can delay wages, confiscate passports, and deport workers, while authorities rarely prosecute violations. Domestic workers – overwhelmingly women – suffer disproportionately, often facing forced confinement, overwork, and various forms of abuse with no labour-law protection.

Reforms, and their limits 🔗

Pressure from international observers – amplified around the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar – has forced incremental reforms across the GCC. Qatar abolished its kafala system on paper in 2020 and introduced a non-discriminatory minimum wage in 2021. Bahrain announced a similar move years earlier. In June 2025, Saudi Arabia formally ended its kafala system, allowing approximately 13 million migrant workers – many from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal – to change employers and exit the country without sponsor approval.

However, reforms remain uneven. The Migration Policy Institute observes that changes have been selectively targeted, with the largest benefits flowing to investors and white-collar workers rather than low-skilled labourers from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Enforcement also lags far behind legislation. None of the six GCC states has signed the major United Nations conventions on protecting migrant workers’ rights – a structural gap that limits how far on-paper reforms can travel into the lives of actual workers.

The need for stronger labour rights 🔗

Strengthening protection for South Asian migrant workers is not just an ethical question; it is also a development question, because remittances are central to household welfare and to national balance of payments in the sending countries. Several directions are emerging.

Bilateral and multilateral agreements: Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) between sending and receiving countries are increasingly common, covering recruitment standards, wage protection, and grievance mechanisms. India, for example, has signed MoUs with several Gulf states, although enforcement has been patchy.

Ethical recruitment and skills certification: Government-to-government models like South Korea’s EPS show that eliminating private brokers can drastically cut migration costs and reduce vulnerability. The IOM Asia-Pacific has advanced ethical recruitment initiatives across the region, focusing on safer pathways and reducing the role of exploitative intermediaries.

Pre-departure orientation and reintegration: Workers who understand their contracts, rights, and grievance channels before leaving are less vulnerable. Equally important is what happens on return – many migrants come back with savings but few transferable skills or social protections, leaving them at risk of re-migrating into the same exploitative cycles. The Kerala model of return-migrant surveys and welfare boards offers one template for sending regions trying to manage circular migration more humanely.

Convention ratification and enforcement: The 1990 UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers remains poorly ratified, especially by destination countries. Sustained diplomatic pressure, alongside civil society advocacy, will be needed to close that gap.

What do you think? If you were designing a labour migration policy for a South Asian country, would you focus more on diversifying destinations away from the Gulf, or on strengthening protections for workers already going there? And how should the responsibility for migrant welfare be shared between sending governments, destination governments, and recruitment agencies?

References

1. https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/@asia/@ro-bangkok/@sro-new_delhi/documents/publication/wcms_645286.pdf
2. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-39814-8_8
3. https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/article/29/4/385/6422223
4. https://gsp.cgdev.org/legalpathway/employment-permit-system-eps/
5. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/684731537420880821/pdf/130020-P156586-Korea-report-F-singles-web.pdf
6. https://roasiapacific.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl671/files/documents/2023-07/iom_labour-migration-in-asia_what-does-the-future-hold.pdf
7. https://www.aseanact.org/resources/apea-briefs/
8. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614524.2022.2059448
9. https://www.migrationdataportal.org/regional-data-overview/southern-asia
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafala_system
11. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/supporting-indian-workers-in-the-gulf-what-delhi-can-do/
12. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/gulf-region-gcc-migration-kafala-reforms
13. https://roasiapacific.iom.int/migrant-protection-and-assistance