Belal Hossain Biplob

A 15-year-old who boarded a boat in 2014 at Teknaf in Cox's Bazar believing he would earn a fortune in Malaysia, returned home on

Hundreds of Bangladeshi migrants, most of them undocumented, in Malaysia are thronging Bangladesh High Commission in Kuala Lumpur every day for obtaining their passports, birth certificates and other necessary documents to become legal in the Southeast Asian country.

For the past few days, there has been a rather surprising change in the way things go on at the Agargaon passport office in the capital.

They had no idea about how they would get to the United States of America. They were kept in the dark about their uncertain and perilous journey. They were just asked to follow instructions, no questions asked.

While most of us are content with maintaining social connections, even the very casual ones, with Facebook and catching up on what friends have been up to, looking at their holiday photos or photos of their children, some have been using Facebook for study materials and getting jobs.

Monjur Islam, a 20-year-old Bangladeshi, travelled at least 15,000km in 11 countries of Asia and the Americas in his four-month-long journey to reach his dreamland, the United States of America.

The news came a day after she sat for her fourth-year final examinations, and since then she could not concentrate on her study.

They left their homes early last year in search of better employment opportunities and livelihoods in Malaysia.

More than two lakh undocumented Bangladeshi migrants in Malaysia are set to be regularised, with the legalisation procedure expected to begin next week. The process will go on simultaneously with the recently-agreed recruitment of 1.5 million fresh Bangladeshi workers, said sources in Bangladesh High Commission in Kuala Lumpur.

Around 300,000 new jobs will be created in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in next four years ahead of the World Expo 2020 that is scheduled to be held in Dubai.

Around 3 lakh registered Bangladeshi migrant workers in Malaysia would have to pay the levy previously paid by their employers as the country yesterday imposed a new levy on foreign workers.

Afzal Hossain of Noakhali had gone to Saudi Arabia for job, spending Tk 6 lakh.

A sum of Tk 50 crore does not seem to be any money at all to the people at the home and foreign ministries. The amount, which should have been in the government coffer, now lies with a foreign company.

In the wake of a series of controversies, the Bangladesh High Commission in Kuala Lumpur now says Malaysia's appointing a company would establish its absolute control over labour recruitment from Bangladesh.

"Less than an hour after the voting began, some seven to eight ruling party men stormed the booth I was assigned to. Identifying themselves as Chhatra League and Jubo League activists, they tried to take the ballots away from me."

IN 2015, we witnessed the ghastly experiences of thousands of Bangladeshi migrants, rescued from the death traps set by the human traffickers...

Some polling centres in Savar municipality recorded an abnormally high turnout yesterday although the presence of voters was visibly thin.

Bangladeshi migrant workers often don't get expected services from the labour wings of the country's foreign missions despite the fact that they send home remittance of around $14 billion a year. In most cases, officials and staffs at the wings are unresponsive to the needs of the workers abroad, a number of migrant workers and rights activists told The Daily Star yesterday.

Law enforcers have so far failed to arrest any of the masterminds behind the trafficking of over 3,000 Bangladeshis through the Bay of Bengal this year. They have been carrying out drives to track down human traffickers and their ring leaders since the trafficking victims were rescued mostly from Thailand and Malaysia in May and June. In the last six months, law enforcers could only arrest around 400 alleged middlemen and local agents of human-trafficking networks, not any of the ring leaders.

Even though two probe bodies found four officials of DIP guilty of issuing over 100 government-employee passports based on fake certificates, a section of home ministry officials are now trying to save one of them from punishment.