Iraq's Foreign Laborers: Disillusioned and Disliked

BAGHDAD -- Mitu Ananty left his native Bangladesh in January on a gamble.

The 29-year-old father of two had sold his house and borrowed the life savings of two siblings to come up with the $5,000 demanded by labor brokers. Like a growing number of struggling foreign workers, Ananty had come to regard a temporary job in Iraq as a passport out of poverty.

He soon realized he had been duped. Instead of the $400-a-month position he had been promised in northern Iraq's safe autonomous Kurdish region, Ananty, who left his wife and children behind, ended up with a job paying half that much at a steamy bakery in Baghdad.

"It's not enough even for phone cards and cigarettes," he complained on a recent morning, as co-workers scurried by carrying trays of dough.

A stream of migrants have poured into Iraq's soft and contracting job market in recent months, trafficked by fly-by-night labor brokers. Many, like Ananty, are swiftly disillusioned by their failure to secure a decent job or, in some cases, any job. At the same time, their presence is triggering resentment among the local population and a rash of promises by the government to stem the tide.

Iraqi officials in Baghdad and the Kurdish north say they are trying to make it harder for employers to tap into the seemingly endless supply of cheap foreign labor that many contend is deepening Iraq's unemployment crisis and driving wages down.

"Iraq will be undertaking giant projects this year and in the coming years," Labor Ministry spokesman Abdulla al-Lamie said in a recent statement. "But we will not issue licenses to companies bringing foreign laborers until the unemployment crisis in Iraq ends."

The Kurdistan Regional Government, meanwhile, is demanding that those who hire foreign workers register them and provide a $50,000 collateral payment to prevent employers from cutting them loose or failing to repatriate them when the work is completed.

But because regulation is lax and the government cannot afford to deport illegal workers, employers across the country continue to embrace the inexpensive foreign laborers.

"They work harder than Iraqi workers," said Hussein Abdul, a Baghdad restaurant owner who recently hired three Bangladeshis. "If you ask an Iraqi worker to do something, they say yes and then don't do it. These do exactly what you tell them to do."

Iraq has been a magnet for foreign workers for decades. During the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, tens of thousands of Sudanese and Filipinos were hired to work in oil fields and other sectors.

Few workers were brought in during the '90s, when the economy soured as a result of U.N. sanctions. But the 2003 U.S.-led invasion put Iraq on the map for labor brokers as the U.S. military and its partners hired thousands of third-country nationals for menial jobs at military bases and in reconstruction projects.