• Sri Lanka should update migrant labour policies
• More accredited studies on migrant labour markets needed
• Sri Lanka should diversify overseas labour market opportunities
• Targeted programmes needed to help vulnerable groups at risk of trafficking

 As a result of the economic crisis, Sri Lanka is once again seeing a surge in people migrating overseas. According to the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), there has been a considerable increase from 122,795 people leaving in 2021 to 311,269 in 2022.

Despite so many people leaving the country for work annually, the policies on labour migration are yet to be updated to ensure safe, orderly, and regular migration for all Sri Lankan migrant workers and their families. 

To address this issue, the International Labour Organization (ILO) prepared a report titled ‘Labour migration research on Sri Lanka – What do we know? What don’t we know?’ authored by Madushika Lansakara, which was handed over to the Ministry of Labour and Foreign Employment last week. 

The publication highlighted the overall gaps in labour migration research related to Sri Lanka – where there was insufficient disaggregation of datasets and statistics such as gender, skills, or employment categories and the country/region of destination – that makes it difficult to understand their unique challenges and needs that shape their migration experience. 

The publication recommends that all data collected on future research be further disaggregated according to gender, skill category, and country of destination. A larger portion of the research was primarily conducted for female domestic workers and male construction workers employed in the Gulf Arab states.

However, in order to diversify its labour market, Sri Lanka needs to tap into new employment sectors; any future labour market analyses and skills mapping will need to explore alternative employment sectors for both men and women migrant workers.

A majority of the existing research on labour migration related to Sri Lanka revolves around the Sri Lanka-Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC)/Arab states migration corridor.

Only a handful of studies (most conducted by academics unaffiliated with the SLBFE/Ministry of Labour and Foreign Employment or implementing agencies) explore migration experiences in South Korea and Israel.

If Sri Lanka hopes to expand the employment opportunities available to aspiring migrant workers, then further research must be carried out in East Asia (e.g., South Korea, Japan, and Malaysia) and Europe (Poland and Romania).

Impact of the 2022 crisis

Given the political and economic crisis that the country experienced in 2022, there was a daily increase of aspiring and prospective migrant workers, which had a significant impact on the foreign employment industry. Whilst this publication was compiled by 25 stakeholders, those working in the labour migration sector in Sri Lanka had observed the following impacts:

• Daily increase in demand for foreign employment opportunities due to increased and proposed job redundancies coupled with the rupee depreciation and increasing cost of living
• Concerns that aspiring or prospective migrants would seek irregular pathways for migration, prompting the need to identify vulnerable groups who would use such irregular channels and implement strategies to mitigate and direct them to safe and regular pathways for migration
• The emergence of new categories of migrant workers belonging to higher-skilled and professional categories as well as public sector officials who are facing job redundancies; the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment to come up with a strategy to address the needs of these aspiring professional migrant workers as well as address the needs and challenges of lower-skilled migrant workers
• The need to conduct additional labour market analyses and skills mapping for professionals and the public workforce for foreign job placements, capturing the emerging migrant worker categories

Thematic areas of research

Given that 59 research and study documents relating to labour migration were reviewed, the publication further segregated them under thematic areas of labour migration governance, foreign employment recruitment, skills and migration, gender and migration, remittances of migrant workers, return and reintegration of migrant workers, and climate change and migration.

The thematic area of labour migration governance further breaks down into two main categories – (a) implementation of the National Labour Migration Plan, and (b) analyses of patterns of Sri Lankan migrant workers and Sri Lankan diaspora. The key messaging of most of these studies pointed out the lack of sufficient data and evidence on migrants to form concrete analyses on labour migration patterns and trends to create an evidence base for policy decisions. 

The existing research on foreign employment recruitment practices focuses primarily on the Arab states. The review suggests that if Sri Lanka is keen on diversifying the labour market for foreign employment (in terms of employment categories and destination countries), then additional corridors such as Europe and Southeast Asia (Japan and the Republic of Korea) should be explored further.

To further understand the best practices in fair and ethical recruitment one could refer to (a) the benefits of fair recruitment across the Nepal-Jordan corridor and (b) a ‘Best Practice Guide on Ethical Recruitment of Migrant Workers’ developed by a New York-based organisation. Both publications share good practices, which could be replicated in the South and Southeast Asian region.

In terms of the existing research, linking to skills and migration relevant to Sri Lanka is identified as (a) assessment of skills qualifications framework, that has an impact on the labour market and demand in destination countries; (b) mapping of labour market trends and skills profiles of Sri Lankan migrant workers in destination countries; and (c) assessment of national skills qualifications systems and procedures in Sri Lanka, including gaps and challenges to meet national and international labour market expectations.

The thematic area of gender and migration does not have equal representation amongst all genders as much of the research that was conducted is only focused on women migrant domestic workers with a special focus on the Family Background Report (FBR) that was introduced in 2013 by the SLBFE.

The discourse includes a review and analysis of national legislation and policies that impact migration and mobility of women migrant (domestic) workers, as well as challenges faced along the migration cycle (recruitment, pre-departure, in-service, and return). All studies unanimously find that the FBR policy is associated with higher involvement of lower-skilled workers in recruitment-related corruption, higher exposure to recruitment-related vulnerability, and lower foreign employment opportunities.

Recommendations include policy alternatives to the FBR to improve access to safe pathways to migration for women and better child- and elderly-care support structures to support families left behind. The migration experiences of women and men are drastically different and require different sets of services and support, so it is imperative that all future research and data collected on Sri Lankan migrant workers are gender disaggregated. 

The cost to transfer remittances from migrant workers to Sri Lanka prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic crises was low and ranged between 4-5%. However, with the recent financial crises, the shortage of foreign exchange has increased demand on Sri Lankans abroad to send funds home, which could be a reason for the increased remittance costs. While it is observed that there is an increased utilisation of irregular money-transferring channels, the review suggests conducting a trend analysis of remittance sending patterns to Sri Lanka. 

In terms of data collection on the return and reintegration of migrant workers, many of the publications produced and commissioned by international organisations focus on policies and frameworks to facilitate the social and economic return and reintegration of migrant workers. These include reviews of existing policies and practices related to the return and reintegration of migrant workers from South and Southeast Asian countries of origin, including social protection, insurance, and welfare schemes for returned migrant workers.

Unfortunately, in most cases, the reports lack data on actual returned migrant workers, including statistics of returned migrant workers, who they are, where they are, reasons for the return, and their overall (positive or negative) migration experiences. Therefore, publications that provide an overview of existing policies and practices fall short of assessing the effectiveness and impact of the policies in facilitating the safe return and reintegration of returned migrant workers.

With Sri Lanka placed in the top 20 countries at risk of disasters and extreme weather events, it is imperative to study the link between climate change and migration. Being an emerging topic and an identified thematic area, the review suggests that further studies and research needs to be conducted covering mapping and analysis of migration patterns and decision-making (push and pull factors), in the context of climate change-related events, the aftermath of Covid-19, and the current economic crisis in Sri Lanka. 

Furthermore, analysing the interconnections between climate change and labour migration in Sri Lanka’s institutional and policy landscape, assessing economic diversification and resilient livelihoods for vulnerable households and returned migrant workers, as well as the role of remittances in building climate resilience and exploration of risk management mechanisms would provide sufficient data in better understanding how climate change impacts migration.

Knowledge hub 

Based on the findings and recommendations presented through this review the ILO will assist the Ministry of Labour and Foreign Employment to establish a knowledge hub that will curate research studies conducted on labour migration during the recent past for the use of stakeholders while identifying knowledge gaps for evidence-based policymaking. 

It will allow policymakers to have a better understanding of the present context as well as upcoming trends in labour migration through which the decision-making process will be streamlined to address the existing issues and envisage the upcoming challenges in labour migration.

All attempts made by The Sunday Morning to contact Minister of Labour and Foreign Employment Manusha Nanayakkara for comment on the report failed.