Transnational Cross-Border Family Ties: Diasporic Lives of Bangladeshis in Italy and Beyond

The scope of this paper is to gain a better understanding of how Bangladeshi migrants in Italy maintain transnational family attachments, across multiple destinations, with the home country as well as with several host countries. The data comes from fieldwork in Northeast Italy. Research methods include in-depth interviews and participant observation. The findings reveal that a high proportion of Bangladeshi migrants maintain a variety of transnational and diasporic ties with their family and friends living in the country of origin and different European countries. These include family obligations, remittances, establishing businesses back home, visits and communication. They also preserve their national identity in this host society by maintaining cultural ways of belonging and through religious practices and involvement in Bangladeshi politics. The findings have also shown that Italian Bangladeshi families work to foster transnational family ties among the new generations born in Italy, who have little knowledge of their ancestral country. On a final note, this paper argues that transnational connections with the homeland play an important role in shaping the diasporic lives of Bangladeshis in Italy.

Bangladesh healthcare corruption and workforce vulnerability amidst the COVID-19 pandemic

Amidst the pandemic resulting in a global health crisis, Bangladesh was unnerved by the fake COVID-19 test result certificates issued by the private Regent Hospital in Dhaka. The healthcare corruption was exposed when the Il Messaggero (The Messenger) daily newspaper in Rome reported that infected Bangladeshi migrants were moving undetected throughout the city and were thus a potential health risk. What is the impact of healthcare corruption during a pandemic for the vulnerable people of a developing country in a globalized economy? This article assesses the plight of the Bangladeshi migrant labor force and the ready-made garment sector domestic work force within the framework of vulnerability interdependence, discussing the democratic consolidation context, the environment that led to the issuance of fake healthcare certificates and the potential implications for tackling corruption.

Social Stigma and COVID-19: The Experiences of Bangladeshi Returnees from Italy

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has escalated social discrimination against migrants around the world. However, research on the forms of social stigma faced by the returned migrants in their home countries is absent. Based on in-depth interviews with Bangladeshi migrants who returned from Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article explores their experiences of discrimination and social harassment in Bangladesh. Drawing on Link’s and Phelan’s (2001) conceptual framework of social stigma, this study finds that returned migrants experienced different forms of social harassment and stigmatization, including labeling, stereotyping, social separation, status loss, and discrimination.

COVID-19, Racial Capitalism, and Undocumented Bangladeshi Agricultural Workers in Manolada, Greece

This article uses the example of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants in the strawberry sector of Greece to highlight how racial capitalism heightens the health vulnerabilities of racialized low-class migrant workers and exposes them to a greater risk of COVID-19 transmission. Race-based devaluation of workers intersects with migrant illegality and culturally-specific masculine norms to normalize a discourse of healthcare “undeservingness” for undocumented racialized migrants. Unfree labor is legislated through restrictive migrant labor laws and selective detention and deportation of “illegal” migrants. Structural and systemic discriminations increase health precarities for undocumented agricultural workers.

A Study on Perception on the Malay Language Proficiency among Bangladeshi Migrants Who are Involved in the Business Sector in Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia whom with open arms welcomes foreigners to help develop its economy catches the attention of especially the Bangladeshis. Undoubtedly, the presence of Bangladeshis has helped in filling in the vacancies in many sectors such as plantation, construction, services and manufacturing. Their work stint and experience gained leads to a paradigm shift, from an employee to an entrepreneur. Migration to Malaysia demands them to learn and acquire the Malay language for survival. In addition, proficiency in the Malay language is an added value as it makes them feel contented, secure and successful. This study aims to look at the perception on the proficiency of the Bangladeshis entrepreneurs who are adapting the Malay language as the main medium of communication. The relation between levels of education and proficiency in 1) speaking, 2) reading and 3) writing is analysed. This study also evaluates the importance of the Malay language usage among Bangladeshis in managing businesses. A survey was conducted on 56 Bangladeshi migrants who were involved in the business field in Kuala Lumpur. Surely, it is crucial for Bangladeshis who wish to work in this country to be proficient in the Malay language. This is to ensure their survival strategy is sustained, allowing them to tap a gold mine in Malaysian soil.

Social construction of migrant identities: everyday life of Bangladeshi migrants in West Bengal

The construction of migrant population across India–Bangladesh borders is premised on cultural affiliation, religious sentiments and the contingent political economy. With a history of partition in different phases, the subjective conceptions of identity of migrants are layered and complex. The article unravels how identities of migrants are shaped in everyday life through the frame of legality–illegality, religious–political and economic–social aspects. Drawing on previous research and empirical engagement, the article engages with the questions on citizenship, residency, identity, belonging, exclusion and inclusion. The field work in the borderland district of North 24 Parganas provides rich description about the life and circumstances of migrants at the threshold of security and insecurity, belonging and unbelonging around layers of caste and communal tangle. The article presents a grounded understanding on the politics of documenting and phenomenon of maintaining undocumentedness. To explain the social construction of identity, the article explores the role of Hindu nationalist ideas that influences the negotiation of migrant populations around religious lines; either accepted, ignored, patronized or kept insecure, susceptible to fear and exclusion.

Centering the Margins: The Precarity of Bangladeshi Low-Income Migrant Workers During the Time of COVID-19

A global outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) has profoundly escalated social, political, economic, and cultural disparities, particularly among the marginalized migrants of the global South, who historically remained key sufferers from such disparities. Approximately 8 million, such workers from Bangladesh, migrated from their homelands to work in neighboring countries, specifically in Southeast Asia and in the Middle East, and also contribute significantly to their country’s economy. As many of the migrant workers work on temporary visas, scholars have expressed concerns about their physical and psychological health such as joblessness, mortality, abuses, daunting stress, and inhabitable living environment. Embracing the theoretical frameworks of critical–cultural communication, this article explores two research questions: (1) What are the emerging narratives of experiencing realities and disparities among the Bangladeshi migrants at the margins? (2) How the migrants negotiated and worked on overcoming the adversities? In doing so, we have closely examined 85 Facebook Pages (number of subscribers: 10,000-1 million), dedicated to issues of Bangladeshi migrant workers to qualitatively analyze emerging mediated discourses (textual, visual, and audiovisual). Our analysis reveals several aspects, including, (1) impact of job insecurities on migrants and their families, (2) living conditions of and abuses on migrants works, (3) negotiations of mental stress by the marginalized migrants, and (4) how community support helps the migrants to survive during the pandemic.

The Value of Grassroots English for Bangladeshi Migrants to the Middle East

This chapter, based on a research in rural Bangladesh, investigates the value of grassroots English for the Bangladeshi migrant workers in the Middle East, and sheds light on some of the methodological and ethical issues relevant to the findings. The chapter draws insights from the narratives of three participants and argues that it is difficult to establish a straightforward relationship between grassroots English/language skills and successful economic migration because of issues like global inequality, and the social and psychological costs of economic migration should also be considered. The chapter provides useful sociolinguistic insight into the value of English in a grassroots area of growing importance, economic migration, which is relatively under-explored. It also describes the methodological and ethical complexities of working with vulnerable communities, such as low/semi-skilled economic migrants, while also throwing into relief the value of gaining insight into their experiences, language practices and reflections.

Unintended asylum seekers: Bangladeshi probashi from Libya to Italy

This paper focuses on Bangladeshi migrants, who have recently reached Italy from Libya. It discusses the results of fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2018 with Bangladeshi asylum seekers living in the Parma area who are, or havebeen, hosted in emergency reception centers called CAS (Centri di Accoglienza Straordinaria). The aim of this paper isto explore the characteristics of this recent migration flow and to examine how migrants navigate the country’s formalreception system, adapting to and at the same time manipulating it. Migrants face a legal and political regime that is quitedifferent from that of the 1990s and early 2000s. In order to secure refugee status, they find themselves caught up in astate-managed, complex reception system. Despite being in a weak and precarious position they move tactically in anunstable and uncertain environment to suit their life objectives.

Italian-Bangladeshi in London. A community within a community?

Based on a multi-sited ethnography in Italy and the United Kingdom, this contribution focuses on the onward migration of Italian-Bangladeshis to London, that is, Bangladeshi migrants who acquired EU citizenship in Italy and then moved to the British Capital. After the presentation of the reasons for this onward migration, the article will analyse the representation, constructed by the Italian-Bangladeshis interviewed in London, of the relationships between them (coming from different districts of Bangladesh) and the members of the “historical” British Bangladeshi community, in London since generations (originating primarily from the Bangladeshi district of Sylhet). Specifically, it will focus on the on mistrust – sometimes a fully-fledged hostility – between the two communities as it was narrated by the Italian-Bangladeshi respondents, framing it as a dichotomy between British citizens and (Southern) European citizens; as a wider dichotomy between residents of Bangladeshi origin in London, but originating from different regional contexts in Bangladesh; as an effect of the social stratification of the “Bangladeshi Diaspora” in the world.