It is easily one of the most common emotional refrains you hear these days: our women and men have all left to work abroad; our villages and towns are depopulated; we have to find a way to provide them meaningful employment opportunities at home.

Remittances or earnings that Nepali workers send back home from their jobs abroad have become the most critical part of our economy. It has been the bedrock of the Nepali economy for the last decade, preventing an economic collapse during the country’s darkest hour. Nepal receives approximately Rs 400 billion in remittances annually. That’s only what comes in officially—a significant portion also comes through informal channels. 

Although these workers have helped to prevent our economy from entirely collapsing, there is an overbearing sense of national pity that pervades their plight. In their stump speech, politicians talk emotionally about how we must find a way to bring our brothers and sisters back home. In their analytical assessments, policymakers write convincingly about how we need to build the environment for meaningful domestic jobs so our brothers and sisters don’t have to toil away in foreign lands. When caught at the airport’s immigration behind a long line of workers heading abroad, all of Kathmandu’s elite bristle with sadness to note that our brothers and sisters have no choice but to seek employment abroad. 

There is an overbearing sense of national pity for Nepali workers toiling away in the Middle East, East Asia and elsewhere. We imagine them, a shovel in hand perhaps, for most are unskilled, in far-off lands, longing for their families, missing the whiff of the fresh Himalayan scent and the reassurance of a mother’s touch. Their earning saves our economy and our country. But we, the ones left behind, just can’t help feeling sad about those that had to leave to seek employment opportunities abroad. 

Why this sense of national shame?

Our policy on foreign employment and our conscience must rid of this sense of pity and shame. It is only when we adopt a healthier, more positive attitude towards foreign employment across all categories of jobs—unskilled, skilled and knowledge-based—that we can really begin to unlock the full potential of this trend. The transformative power of foreign employment is far broader than just the Rs 400 billion support it provides to our economy. But to galvanize the transformation, we must get over our sense of pity and adopt a more positive outlook to what it can achieve.

No country has ever developed by containing its citizens. At critical moments in their history, all developed countries have actively encouraged their citizens to seek fortunes abroad. Europeans and other developed countries colonized much of the world. It helped them gain access to markets and resources that they lacked, or in some cases, just get more of what they already had. 

Nepali workers driving oil trucks across the deserts of Saudi Arabia or guarding bungalows in Mumbai are not exactly the colonizing armies ready to take over countries. They don’t bring home resources or access to markets. But to recognize the analogy, we must first challenge the false nationalism that argues that our brothers and sisters would be happier and our country better served if they were all gainfully employed domestically. Even if there were plentiful meaningful domestic employment opportunities, foreign jobs should remain a key part of our national development strategy. 

Our workers abroad, whether skilled or unskilled, could serve as innovative gateways to markets and resources. For that, these workers need to see the potential beyond the immediate job that they do. They need training, encouragement and support to graduate from being a driver of an oil truck to a logistic manager, or perhaps to leap from a mere ‘Bahadur’ guard of a bungalow in Mumbai to a professional bodyguard. 

To open new possibilities from the simple skilled or unskilled tasks that they perform, all that these workers need is an active, committed support infrastructure instead of the peering eyes of meddlesome officials or the condescending pity of their country's people.

On a recent taxi ride from Kathmandu airport, I was driven home by someone who had returned recently after years of driving oil tanker trucks across Saudi Arabia.  “Driving is all I know,” he told me. He had used part of his earnings to procure one of those new taxi cabs at the airport. He had figured out a little niche business on the side, of taking tourists from the region on sightseeing visits around Kathmandu in his taxi. He spoke their language and he knew what they wanted. The nice, clean, new cab helped. But he had received no support. He had to build it all himself, slowly.

It was peculiar irony I thought. Some 17,000 ex-Maoist combatants were reintegrated in one form or another; 74 of them were selected as army cadets earlier this month. The taxi driver, returning home after many years on foreign roads as an oil truck driver, received no reintegration support. He had to figure it out all by himself. All that he needed were some simple schemes to support him: build a small business with earnings from abroad, pay no taxes for 10 years; invest earnings from abroad and get a collateral-free small business loan. There are infinite examples of such schemes, which could be cleverly adapted to expand the range of opportunities at home or in their host country. 

“It was hard being away from home for so long,” the taxi driver explained to me. One of the big challenges for migrant labor is the social cost of being separated from their families over extended periods of time. Rather than use the social cost as an excuse to pity the workers and find a way to contain them at home, we must look more proactively at how to overcome those costs. Are there ways, for instance, that migrant workers can travel with their families, including children who are then educated there while their parents are employed?

Migrant workers are not simply a passing phase that will reverse once our economy perks up and we have domestic jobs aplenty. This is a growing trend. Developed and many newly developing countries with aging populations are in search of new taxpayers. A deeply fundamental structural shift to a knowledge-based service economy in these countries is leading to a persistent shortage of certain types of unskilled and skilled workers. The sooner we recognize these trends and evolve a supporting strategy to help our migrant workers, the better prepared we will be for the changing global world in which we must participate and thrive. 

The overbearing national shame and pity towards migrant workers heading abroad ultimately stems from three entrenched positions: politicians will have fewer people on whom they can count on for their votes; policymakers will have fewer people whose poverty they need to alleviate; and Kathmandu elites will have fewer people who will make and serve them tea. 

The construction of a new Nepal must begin with the deconstruction of irrational nationalism and self-promoting pity. Migrant workers don’t need our pity, they need our unconditional support. 

Published on: 17 September 2013 | Republica