Aktar is 19 years old and is more than 7,000 kilometers from his home. She left her home, in Shariatpur, a district of Dhaka (the capital of Bangladesh) at 17 and without saying anything to her parents. “My dream was to reach Europe,” she says. Today he lives in Palermo, where he works as a delivery man for a popular food delivery app.
At first, he tried to emigrate legally to join his cousins and uncles in Venice. “In Bangladesh there is no future, so I wanted to leave at all costs. At first I had tried to get to Italy legally, with a sponsor, but in the end it was not possible and I had to choose this path,” he says. The clandestine route turned out to be a via crucis that crossed the violent and convulsed Libya. “It was very difficult. I suffered a lot… But now I’m here and I want to grow,” he confesses.
He was younger when he and a friend contacted a trafficker, a ‘dalal’, who took them to Dubai and from there to Libya, from where they would reach Europe. In these first two stops they paid 4,000 euros and used false passports. Aktar appeared to be 21 years old, when in fact he had just turned 17. As soon as he landed in Benghazi, Libyan traffickers confiscated his passport.
“After landing, many things happened, even the police are criminals there, they are all dalal. As soon as we landed, they took our passports and took us to a center, where I stayed for eight days; then they transferred us to Tripoli,” he recalls. They were actually detention centers.
“Experiencing Libya was the most terrible, I was not even afraid during the sea voyage, compared to what I had felt in Libya. In the middle of the sea, I knew that death was near, I could see it with my own eyes. When the ship was It broke and the water entered through the holes that had been formed, many people were screaming, each one said a different thing, they were crying. But I was calm, if death was there, I couldn’t do anything,” he says.
But he made it ashore, disembarked in Sicily in October 2021 and in Italy he was able to go to classes, obtain a certificate of studies and learn Italian. The problem is that by then she had a debt to pay to the traffickers: 8,000 euros. Today she works as a ‘rider’. Since she does not have papers, she shares the delivery account in the apps with another partner. “In the app you have to show your photo; I use my friend’s face,” she explains.
It is a common occurrence among the Bangladeshi community. According to various reports, there is an illegal market around ‘delivery’ applications in Palermo, some ‘riders’ rent their account to undocumented workers, including minors, with agreements reached through social networks.
UN estimates indicate that between 450,000 and 500,000 migrants work in the Italian food sector, roughly half of the industry’s workforce, and it is the sector where most newcomers find employment. The data also indicates that it is the employment area with the highest proportion of undocumented immigrant workers in Italy.
European media coverage of migration has largely focused on sub-Saharan Africans making the perilous journey by boat across the Mediterranean to Italy. However, the plight of the Bangladeshis, the second largest group to reach the country’s shores after the Tunisians, has gone largely unnoticed.
In recent years, thousands of Bangladeshis have flocked to Sicily in search of a better life. It is estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 nationals of this Asian country live in Palermo alone. However, many of them are exploited, and many are hired to work in the food industry in appalling conditions. Many, including minors and undocumented workers, work in terrible working conditions. They face criminal networks that take advantage of their hard work and desperation, in a country with no national minimum wage. They have no labor protection or access to unions, which means food companies have a free hand to abuse them.
“I work seven days a week and earn 60 euros a day.” Yusuf is 28 years old and is also from Bangladesh. He works in Palermo as a delivery man for a well-known ‘delivery’ company. It is a sunny afternoon in the historic center of the Sicilian city, where dozens of young Bangladeshi migrants like Yusuf get around on bicycles and motorbikes delivering food from sought-after restaurants. Inside the kitchens, other compatriots work long hours for little pay in sushi and poke restaurants, which have become the latest fashion in the city and are experiencing a ‘boom’.
Yusuf arrived in Italy eight years ago, but his final destination is the UK, where he hopes to go on a visa in December. There he has a sister to meet. In Bangladesh he left behind his mother, a 20-year-old brother and a 16-year-old sister, to whom he sends money every month. “First I flew from Bangladesh to Iran, then through Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Hungary, Austria and finally Italy. The whole trip took 45 days,” he says. He didn’t choose to go to Italy, but here he is stranded.
The IOM estimates that there are 20,000 Bangladeshis currently in Libya. According to the UN, the majority intend to embark on small boats heading to Italy, on the same migratory route that North African and sub-Saharan African emigrants usually use. Bangladeshis who survive the deadly sea voyage to Europe do not have it easy in Italy either: most are not deemed deserving of asylum and are often returned to Libya. According to the UN, in 2020 more than 1,214 Bangladeshis were returned to Libya from Italy.
This report is part of Lost in Europe, a cross-border European journalistic investigative project that has received funding from Journalismfund.eu’s Modern Slavery Unveiled programme.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project