In the first week of September, 38 Bangladeshis returned home from Cambodia, some rescued from cyber scam compounds and others unable to return after travelling there for work. They were not the first. A few months earlier, 583 Bangladeshis had returned from Cambodia, while around 1,800 more were reportedly waiting to come home.
According to Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training data cited in recent reports, 15,921 Bangladeshis travelled to Cambodia for employment over the previous year and a half. When returns occur on this scale, they are difficult to treat simply as isolated migration failures.
One returnee from Lakshmipur reportedly paid Tk 5.3 lakh for what he was told would be a computer operator's job. He obtained BMET clearance before departure, but after reaching Cambodia discovered that he had travelled on a one month visit visa.
He alleged that Bangladeshi brokers received him at the airport and eventually handed him over to a cyber scam compound. The case raises a question that awareness campaigns alone cannot answer: If a worker can pass through a formal emigration process while the visa does not correspond with the employment promised, where did verification fail?
A common governance challenge
Cambodia represents one form of migration-related exploitation, but recent developments elsewhere reveal different dimensions of the problem. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, 36 Bangladeshis were among migrants intercepted in two alleged irregular crossing attempts near the Croatian border.
Meanwhile, the better known route through Libya and the Mediterranean continues to involve irregular movement, detention, deaths at sea, and repatriation. On September 1 alone, another 174 Bangladeshis returned from a Libyan detention centre.
These cases should not be treated as identical. Human trafficking, migrant smuggling, deceptive labour recruitment, and irregular migration involve different circumstances and legal questions. Yet they reveal a common governance challenge: By the time a migrant is exploited in a destination country, detained along an irregular route, or rescued and repatriated, several earlier stages of the migration process have already passed.
The policy question therefore begins before rescue or return. It concerns how recruitment practices are verified, how emerging risks are identified, and whether lessons from previous cases influence decisions about future migration.
From individual cases to evidence
Returnee experiences can provide an important source of evidence for prevention. When similar problems involving recruiters, agencies, visas, job offers, or destinations appear across multiple cases, they may indicate weaknesses in the recruitment process rather than isolated individual failures. Systematically identifying these patterns could help authorities investigate emerging risks and strengthen verification before more workers are affected.
The Cambodia cases make this particularly relevant. Authorities can examine what jobs were promised, how much workers paid, what visas they received, whether they obtained emigration clearance, which agencies or intermediaries were involved, and how recruitment took place. If the same visa discrepancy, recruiter, agency, or recruitment method repeatedly appears, that information should inform investigation and future clearance decisions.
The need for such learning is becoming more urgent as recruitment itself changes. Cyber scam compounds show how exploitation can initially resemble legitimate employment.
Jobs may be presented as computer operator, customer service, or call centre positions, while communication takes place through familiar digital platforms. The deception may become clear only after the worker reaches the destination.
This means prevention cannot depend only on telling prospective migrants to be careful. It also requires institutions to recognize changing recruitment patterns and make reliable verification accessible before departure.
One migrant, several institutions
Bangladesh already has institutions responsible for different parts of migration governance. The Ministry of Expatriates' Welfare and Overseas Employment and BMET regulate important aspects of labour migration. Bangladesh missions abroad encounter problems affecting citizens at destination, while the Ministry of Home Affairs, police, immigration, and investigative agencies deal with trafficking, migrant smuggling and organised criminal networks.
The challenge is ensuring that information moves effectively between them. The migrant passes through one journey, not several institutional mandates. Information gathered from a returnee may be relevant to an investigation, a recruiting agency's record, a future clearance decision, a diplomatic mission, and another person considering the same job or destination. If these pieces remain disconnected, each institution may see only one part of the problem.
A more preventive system would therefore connect evidence from returnees, complaints, visa, and clearance records, recruiting agencies, overseas missions, and investigations. This does not require assuming that every unsuccessful migration experience indicates trafficking or institutional failure. It means looking for repeated patterns early enough to determine whether intervention is necessary.
The responsibility behind record remittances
The importance of doing so becomes clearer when these cases are considered alongside Bangladesh's remittance performance. The country received a record $35.5 billion in remittances in fiscal year 2025 to 2026, about 17.3% more than the previous year. The economic contribution of migrant workers is beyond dispute.
But a migration system should not be assessed only by the number of workers who leave or the remittances they eventually send home. Its capacity to identify questionable recruitment, verify employment pathways, detect emerging forms of exploitation, and intervene before harm occurs is equally important.
NGOs and international organizations have important roles in awareness, community engagement, referrals, survivor assistance, and reintegration. Yet there are limits to what project-based interventions can do.
An awareness session cannot authenticate a foreign employer, examine patterns across thousands of visas, regulate a recruiting agency, investigate financial transactions or prosecute an organized network. These functions require institutional authority and coordination.
This is why repeated returns should be understood as more than repatriation events. The 38 Bangladeshis returning from Cambodia, together with hundreds who returned earlier, may provide information about where recruitment safeguards failed.
Bangladeshis intercepted in Bosnia raise different questions about the networks and decisions that brought them onto irregular routes in Europe. Repeated detention and return from Libya can similarly provide evidence about established pathways and intermediaries.
The purpose is neither to portray every migrant as a helpless victim nor to place responsibility entirely on institutions.
Migrants exercise agency, but their decisions are made within recruitment systems and information environments that they cannot independently regulate or verify. Effective migration governance must recognize both realities.
For a country receiving more than $35bn a year from its citizens abroad, bringing people home after exploitation or irregular migration is necessary, but it should not be the end of the response.
The more important test is whether what Bangladesh learns from those who return can prevent the next migrant from facing the same experience.
Md Shihabul Hossain works on irregular migration, human trafficking, and migrant reintegration issues with Brac’s migration program. The views expressed are personal.
