There are around two hundred faces on that wall, in a room off the ring road in Kathmandu, arranged in no order I could work out. Passport photographs, mostly, some cut from group pictures. The agent — I will not use his name, though he was not hiding it — pointed at a few as we talked. That one is in Doha. That one came back. That one I do not know about.
He is, by the standard account, the villain of Nepali labour migration. He takes a fee that can run to a year's wages. He arranges the medical, the training certificate, the visa. Some of what he tells the men is true.
I went to interview him expecting to write the standard account, and I did not write it, because the thing I could not get around was that the men on his wall knew roughly what they were getting into and went anyway, and that a substantial number of them would tell you he was the most useful person they dealt with.
The agent is not the cause of the exploitation. He is the price of a state that will not do the job, and removing him without doing the job would make things worse.
Consider what he supplies. Information about which employers pay and which do not, held in his head, updated by men who call him from the site. A relationship with the recruiting company in Doha, which means a Nepali worker from a village with no institutional access has a counterparty who has a reason to keep dealing with him. A loan, effectively, since the fee is usually credit against future wages. And a person to shout at when it goes wrong, who lives within a day's travel of the family.
The state supplies a foreign employment board with a complaints process I have twice watched families attempt, an approved-employer list that is out of date, and a mandatory orientation that men describe, uniformly, as a room where somebody reads from a laminated sheet.
Given those two options, the men choose the agent. They are not confused.
I want to be exact about what I am not saying. I am not saying agents are benign. The fees are extortionate, the debt bondage they create is the mechanism through which most of the actual abuse happens, and a real fraction of them lie about wages, about the job, about the country. I have sat with a family whose son was told he was going to a hotel and went to a slaughterhouse. That agent should be in prison.
The argument is about sequence. Every reform push I have watched for fifteen years has led with enforcement against agents — licensing, raids, prosecutions, fee caps — because that is visible and satisfying and produces a photograph of a minister. And every time, the function moves underground, the fee goes up to price in the new risk, and the men have less recourse than before, because an unlicensed agent has no licence to lose.
You cannot enforce a function out of existence while the demand for it is unchanged and the alternative is a laminated sheet.
What would work is unglamorous and slow: a state employment service that actually holds the employer relationships, publishes verified wage data, and lends against future wages at a rate that undercuts the agent. Do that and the agents lose the business without anyone raiding anything, because their entire value proposition is being the only party who does those three things.
None of this is unknown. Costed proposals have existed for a decade. They do not happen because they require sustained administrative competence over years, with the payoff arriving after the government that started it has gone, and the alternative — a raid, a headline, a fee cap that nobody can enforce — is available this month.
I asked him what happens to the photographs of men who die. He said he takes them down. He did not say where he puts them, and I did not ask, and I have thought about that omission more than about anything else he told me.
