Brokers manoeuvring il/legal terrains of gendered labour migration control in Nepal
Short description
This project aims to explore Nepal’s restrictive gendered labour migration control, and how the actors in the infrastructure of migration handle and challenge these restrictions.
Background and research aims
Nepal has an extensive labour migration to the Gulf countries and is therefore used as the main case study for this project. The remittances sent back consist of 30% of the GDP (the second highest in the world), which makes the Nepali government strongly dependent on its citizen’s labour migration. Nevertheless, since the 1990s until today Nepal has regulations and bans on women’s labour migration imposed by the government that have forced women to migrate illegally. Due to regulations and the bureaucratic process involved in labour migration, a large amount of private commercial actors, recruitment agencies, agents and more informal brokers, have been established facilitating migrants’ mobility.
The project focuses on the brokers’ understandings of the governments gendered out migration policies and how these policies interplay with the brokers interactions and everyday practises in the gendered recruitment process, and what consequences these restrictions have for women’s and men’s il/legal migration.