For three years, Rydwan, 28, from Comilla, did everything by the book. Visa applications for Serbia, Romania, Slovenia, and Belarus -- each rejected. Work permits that never arrived. Consultancy fees swallowed by middlemen.
He had watched neighbours return from Saudi Arabia and Malaysia with enough money to build new floors onto old homes. He wanted the same. The legal route, he eventually concluded, was a door that did not open for people like him.
“For three years, I tried reaching Europe the legal way through Serbia, Romania, Slovenia, and Belarus, but nothing worked. Then I took the risk of going illegally. People from my village had gone, so I wanted to go too.”
A second fortune seeker, Ishmam, 31, from Narayanganj, started differently. He had migrated to Dubai for construction work, only to find that the promised salary was fiction.
Indebted and disillusioned, he was approached by a facilitator offering an opportunity in Libya. He agreed -- not knowing the route would take him through Syria before depositing him into a Libyan detention facility where guards and traffickers operated as partners.
“They took me from Dubai to Syria, then Syria to Libya. On the boat, they beat people with pipes. I went to attempt the crossing and got caught at sea.”
Both returned home with debts exceeding Tk 1 million, roughly $8075, without reaching Italy.
What they paid to access is what is defined as migrant smuggling: The procurement, for financial or material benefit, of a person’s illegal entry into a state of which they are not a national.
On the Bangladesh-Libya-Italy corridor, that commercial arrangement rarely stays commercial for long.
One in three
In the first four months of 2026, Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, recorded 8,489 irregular crossings on the Central Mediterranean Route. Bangladeshi nationals accounted for 2,510 of them -- nearly one in three.
Bangladesh has no Mediterranean coastline with Libya or Italy, yet it confirms that at least 92,427 Bangladeshis entered Europe through this route between 2009 and 2024, making them the most frequent nationality on the world’s deadliest migration corridor.
The trend line is not a gentle slope. Around 9,009 Bangladeshis arrived in Italy in 2017 via the Central Mediterranean, making them the second-largest nationality on the route by mid-year.
The arrivals from 2020 upsurges sharply: 4,141, then 7,838, then 15,228 in 2022 -- representing 14% of all Mediterranean arrivals that year. Approximately 20,000 Bangladeshis crossed in 2025. This sea route alone has carried 105,719 Bangladeshi crossings since 2009.
At least 10,000 Bangladeshi nationals have been returned from Libya with IOM assistance since 2017. Repatriation flights brought back groups of 110, 143, 157, and 309 returnees between July 2023 and December 2025. What makes the repatriation data analytically troubling is its relationship to arrival data. Both trends are equally upward.
Why irregular? A legal channel that fails most aspirants
Approximately 15,197 nationals receivedcountry clearance from the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET) for legal migration to Italy between October 2023 and June 2026, with 1,253 cleared for Greece.
In the same period, an estimated 34,000 to 40,000 Bangladeshis crossed the Mediterranean irregularly. The ratio is stark: Legal pathways served roughly one in three Italy-bound aspirants. The other two turned to smugglers -- not by preference, but after official doors closed.
The government sets a fixed ceiling for legal migration costs. For example, the maximum cost for a work visa to Italy is currently capped by official regulation.
However, many reports confirm that actual expenses for legal migration are often two to three times higher than government ceilings, with the average cost generally exceeding $3,500. Even so, legal routes remain far less expensive than irregular migration to Italy.
Nearly 54% of migrants heading to Italy through official channels paid more than $4000. Through the irregular corridor, the total costs run three to four times higher. Irregular migration is not a cheap shortcut. It is the most expensive, most dangerous option available -- chosen only after cheaper doors have been slammed shut.
The route as a machine
The corridor is not a single criminal enterprise. It is a modular logistics chain with distinct segments managed by different actors. Brokers in Bangladesh handle recruitment, documentation, and fee collection.
Transit facilitators in the UAE, Egypt, Kuwait, Turkey, India, and Sri Lanka coordinate group movement and manage handovers. Libyan operators -- airport sponsors, armed group representatives, drivers, and coastal smugglers -- control movement inside the country and access to the sea.
The most common route follows Bangladesh-Dubai-Egypt-Libya. Migrants fly commercially from Dhaka to Dubai on tourist visas. Dubai functions as a financial clearinghouse: Payments are confirmed, groups consolidated, and the next segment’s operator notified.
When scrutiny at Dhaka airport tightens, the network activates a bypass through India and Sri Lanka, where migrants wait in guesthouses while Libyan entry documentation is processed. The system does not break under enforcement pressure. It reroutes.
Numerous migrants report being told they were bound for Kuwait or Malaysia, only to discover -- when their passports were confiscated mid-transit in Dubai or Cairo -- that Libya was always the destination.
Gold in the game house
Inside Libya, the commercial logic of smuggling mutates into something coercive.
Facilitators describe Bangladeshi migrants as “gold” -- the most reliable source of payment, because a family in Bangladesh stands behind every migrant and will respond to ransom calls.
A standard package costs $10,000- $14,000 for the full Bangladesh-to-Italy journey. That contracted price is a floor. Inside Libya, fabricated charges accumulate at every new stage -- security fees, food costs, coastal clearance payments -- until actual expenditure reaches $15,000 to $17,000.
The $5,000 to $7,000 gap is quantified coercion, extracted against the threat of abandonment. Migrants inside Libya are sold by brokers as tradable assets.
In one reported instance, seven Bangladeshis were collectively sold for $17,000; the new handler demanded $12,000 per person for release.
A market worth $160 to 190 million -- and growing
With approximately 14,000 Bangladeshis arriving in Italy via Libya in 2024, and a package price of $10,000 to 14,000, the contracted revenue for successful journeys alone reaches $140-196 million.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) market modelling estimates the realistic annual figure at $160 to $190 million. Add the Libya-based extortion premium -- $5,000 to $7,000 per migrant beyond the contracted price -- and the total revenue extracted from Bangladeshi migration aspirants in 2024 likely exceeded $220 million.
If the current growth rate of illegal migration seeking continues -- from approximately 14,000 arrivals in 2024 to an estimated 20,000 in 2025 -- and if per-person costs remain between $10,000 and $17,000, the smuggling economy could reach $200 to $340 million in gross revenue.
Even accounting for interceptions, failed attempts, and returnees, a conservative projection suggests the market could exceed $250 million annually by 2026, cementing its position as one of the world’s largest irregular migration corridors.
A network that adapts, diversifies, and does not stop.
The smuggling network behind this irregular migration does not collapse under pressure. It adapts -- because it is not a single organisation but a decentralised market that connects Bangladesh’s migration-dependent economy.
It has been documented that the brokers who organize legal Gulf migration and the facilitators who feed the irregular corridor use the same documentation networks, credit channels, and recruitment pools. The formal and informal systems are not parallel. They are the same tree.
The network is also shifting its destination hubs. Greece is emerging as a secondary target alongside Italy. The machinery is the same. The destinations are multiplying.
Until Bangladesh’s legal migration infrastructure can absorb the aspirants it currently turns away -- the two in three Italy-bound migrants rejected by official channels -- smugglers will keep making the offer that the state cannot: A pathway, at any cost, to the European labour market that a generation of Bangladeshis has decided is worth dying for.
Zulker Naeen is a Research Coordinator, Center for Critical and Qualitative Studies (CQS) and Adjunct Faculty, Department of Media Studies and Journalism (MSJ), University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). Views expressed are the writer’s own. This article acknowledges the contribution of Karabi Patranabish, who prepared the interview testimonies of five to six fortune seekers who returned from Libya’s detention in May 2026.