Who cares about the private lives of migrant workers?

Arguably, the problem here is not simply the unequal treatment of people in public spaces; it is the unequal recognition of their private lives. Labour migration, at both individual and communal levels, entails the movement of people, their bodies and their cultures. Embedded within these movements are emotions, feelings and affective experiences that often go unnoticed or are suppressed under a hegemonic, authoritative and colonial gaze. Migrant workers are subjected to extreme levels of social control. Moving abroad as a guest worker separates spouses, disrupts intimate lives, reorganises relationships and places emotional well-being under the constraints of employment contracts, immigration rules and economic necessity. Migrants are often celebrated as remittance warriors and partners in national development, while their loneliness and emotional and intimate needs remain largely invisible.

For many Bangladeshi men employed in the Gulf, years of separation from spouses and children are treated as an ordinary price of earning a livelihood. But prolonged separation is not merely an incidental inconvenience. It can strain relationships, intensify loneliness and affect psychological well-being. Women migrant workers face another set of vulnerabilities, particularly those employed in private households, where isolation, employer control and limited access to assistance can make abuse difficult to report. The suffering of domestic workers who return home traumatised, injured or even dead demands far greater attention.

Intimacy, in this context, is not merely a private matter. It is shaped by public policy: who can bring a spouse, who can reunite with children, who can leave an abusive workplace and who can seek help without risking employment or residency.

In many Gulf countries, the migrantisation of justice, sacredness and law and order reveals how these principles are experienced unevenly across social and economic hierarchies. Even as the ongoing Iran–US war reshapes the region, it is migrant workers who remain on the front lines of its human costs, many of them Bangladeshis whose vulnerabilities rarely figure in geopolitical calculations. For migrant workers, particularly those in the lowest tiers of the labour market, access to dignity, protection and justice is shaped by their precarious status. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is building new urban spaces to accommodate global investors and affluent professionals, projecting an image of openness and modernity. The question, therefore, is not simply how Saudi Arabia is modernising, but for whom this modernity is being built and whose lives remain excluded from its promises.

Intimacy and family life are not private luxuries; they are fundamental dimensions of human dignity that migration regimes routinely turn into matters of privilege. West Germany's experience with guest workers from Turkey, Italy, Spain and Portugal after the Second World War illustrates how the assumption of temporary labour can collide with the enduring social and emotional realities of migration. Family reunification gradually became part of the response to this contradiction, albeit unevenly and amid political contestation. Across the Gulf, however, the intimate lives of low-wage migrant workers remain largely peripheral to policy discussions. The reluctance of governments and civil society to engage with these questions reflects a deeper problem: intimacy becomes politically inconvenient when acknowledging it would require recognising migrants as more than a disposable workforce.

Bangladesh, too, must examine its own complicity in this arrangement. Successive governments have depended on remittances while too often approaching migrant protection through recruitment management, emergency repatriation and diplomatic appeals after a crisis. The state cannot claim to value its citizens abroad while treating their private lives as beyond the scope of public responsibility.

The execution of the two Bangladeshis demands scrutiny of the justice system and the protection available to citizens abroad. But it should also prompt a wider reckoning. Migrant workers are neither saints whose personal needs disappear at the border nor remittance machines whose sacrifices can be indefinitely normalised. They are people entitled to dignity in both public and private life.

If Bangladesh is serious about protecting its citizens overseas, it must ask not only whether they receive justice when accused of a crime, but also whether they can live with dignity while earning their livelihoods. The right to family and intimacy must become part of that conversation. Anything less leaves the most personal costs of migration outside the boundaries of public concern.

Dr Anas Ansar is a senior researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, University of Freiburg, Germany, and an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at North South University (currently on leave).

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