Iraq's Foreign Laborers: Disillusioned and Disliked

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 15, 2009

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.

As security improved last year in once-restless provinces in southern and western Iraq, some of the foreign workers brought in by military contractors began trickling into the mainstream economy. Iraqi employers, taking a cue from the Americans, began turning to the labor brokers to import cheap workers. This year, as Baghdad became more stable and secure, business owners here began following suit.

Among the first Iraqis to tap into this labor pool was Ahmed Abu Risha, a founder of the Awakening Councils, armed Sunni groups supported and funded by the U.S. military to fight insurgents. Now a political heavyweight in the western province of Anbar, Abu Risha hired dozens of foreign workers last year to take care of his palatial estate.

Muhammad al-Reshawee, one of Abu Risha's deputies, said the workers, provided by a Dubai-based agency, have been a godsend. "They work very hard," he said, contrasting them with Iraqis, "who refused to do certain jobs like clean bathrooms and sweep floors."

Jasim al-Dulaimy, another tribal leader in Anbar who brought in Bangladeshis, said the workers had adapted well to desert life, adding that he had made them adopt the long, loose dishdashas traditionally worn in the province.

Dulaimy said he doesn't need to worry about the foreign workers joining the insurgency or acting as moles. And there is an additional benefit, he said. Because Awakening leaders have become targets of the insurgents, all his employees are vulnerable. But if any of his foreign workers are killed, he said, "I don't care as much as I do if one of the Iraqis working for me gets killed," explaining that relatives of slain Iraqi employees expect to receive hefty compensation.

One of Abu Risha's workers, who identified himself only by his first name, Tawas, said the work is arduous and the conditions rough.

"They treat us as slaves," the 28-year-old said of his bosses, commonly referred to as sheiks. "There is nothing anyone can do to stop a sheik from transferring one of us to another sheik, as if we were horses."

Rafiq A. Tschannen, who heads the Iraq office of the International Organization for Migration, said headhunters often collect large up-front fees from the workers, who are then sold to local brokers. In extreme cases, he said, workers are misled about where they are going, what kind of jobs they will get and how much they will be paid.

Workers have little recourse when they realize they have been scammed, he said: "This is a very violent, mafia-type industry. People are defenseless."

In most cases, according to employers and Tschannen, the bosses keep the workers' passports. Labor brokers and employers sometimes abandon foreign workers at airports or construction sites if they are no longer needed.

Some Iraqis complain that importing foreign workers to a country with an unemployment rate estimated to be as high as 30 percent is inexcusable. The trend has particularly irked Sunnis, many of whom feel disenfranchised by the Shiite-led government, by far the country's top employer.

Aws al-Nuaimy, chairman of the neighborhood advisory council in Jamiyah, a predominantly Sunni area in western Baghdad, said he has complained to law enforcement officials about the growing number of foreign workers, to no avail.

"The government is weak in chasing these things," he said.

Nuaimy said the laborers are driving down wages by as much as 50 percent in some sectors.

In Baghdad, Ananty and his five Bangladeshi colleagues sleep in a makeshift bedroom on the bakery's roof that was previously used as a storage room. On a recent morning, two of the men lay on thin mattresses on the floor, one with a toothache, the other ill with flu.

"Baghdad is no good," Ananty said. "They lied to me."

The men's boss, Mohamed Abdul Amir, said he is not to blame for the unmet expectations. He said he paid the labor brokers $1,300 for each man and feeds them three times a day.

"They're starting to learn the work," he said, smiling.

Special correspondents Qais Mizher and Dalya Hassan in Baghdad and Dlovan Brwari in Irbil contributed to this report.