Nine Lakh Workers Abroad, $35.5 Billion Home: Bangladesh’s Strongest Number Is Also Its Riskiest

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Bangladesh overseas jobs are booming — and parliament heard the proof this week. More than 9.33 lakh Bangladeshi workers secured employment abroad in the eleven months to 31 May, State Minister for Expatriates’ Welfare Nurul Haque Nur told lawmakers, with the government now targeting roughly 14 lakh in the coming fiscal year and, more ambitiously still, one crore skilled workers over five years.

The money is following the workers home. Remittances reached a record $35.5 billion in FY26, with March alone bringing a single-month record of $3.75 billion, up about 14 percent year on year. At a moment when this page has reported the World Bank’s $1.1 billion emergency support and an economy expected to manage only a gradual recovery in FY27, remittance is not one bright spot among many. It is the load-bearing wall.

The number behind the number

Nur also told parliament that negotiations are ongoing with Malaysia, Oman, the UAE and Bahrain to reopen or expand labour markets that remain closed or restricted. That sentence deserves more attention than the headline figure, because it is an admission of fragility: four of the destinations Bangladesh depends on are not fully open, and access is a matter of diplomacy renegotiated visa by visa, memorandum by memorandum.

This is the structural bet Bangladesh has made for half a century, now at record scale. Nearly a million people a year export their labour so their families can import stability. It works — reserves are steadier, the taka’s pressure is eased, villages are transformed. Economists have warned of exactly the reverse, too: any decline in overseas employment would deepen the economy’s strain almost immediately.

What the strategy does not fix

A record remittance year is a triumph of Bangladeshi workers. It is not a triumph of Bangladeshi economic policy — if anything, it postpones the reckoning with why the domestic economy cannot absorb its own workforce. When a country’s most reliable export is its people, the number to watch is not how many left, but how little has changed for those who stayed.

There is also the ledger nobody reads aloud in parliament: recruitment fees that indenture workers before they fly, the deaths and abuses in Gulf labour camps this page has covered, and the geopolitical exposure of concentrating your national income stream in the same region where, this very week, a ceasefire collapsed and shipping ground to a halt in the Strait of Hormuz. A Gulf at war is not an abstraction for Dhaka. It is where the $35.5 billion comes from.

The migration boom is real, the remittance record is real, and the relief they buy is real. So is the dependency. Bangladesh’s economy is being carried, one airport departure at a time, by citizens the domestic economy could not employ — and a target of one crore more in five years is not a development strategy. It is a wager that the world will keep hiring what Bangladesh cannot.