" No El Dorado: How Asian Migrant Workers’ Romanian Dreams Became Nightmares", 21 October 2024.

Increasing numbers of labour migrants from Asia have been coming to work in Romania with high hopes of European wages – but some end up trapped in debt and exploited by unscrupulous bosses.

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Abdul is a 28-year-old Bangladeshi who came to Romania for work in the summer of 2022. He found employment as a shipyard welder, the same job he did back home, working at a company in a small town on Romania’s Black Sea coast.

To get to Romania, however, he had to pay the equivalent of 4,000 euros for paperwork, transport and a bribe in his home country.

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The company promised him a salary of around 350 euros a month, the minimum wage at the time. By comparison, a Romanian shipyard welder usually earned at least 800-1,000 euros a month at the time. He and 25 of his fellow nationals working at the same company were given one house for all of them in a village nearby, from where they would commute to work.

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After quitting his welding job, Abdul became an illegal immigrant. Under Romanian law, he had 90 days to find another job.

“They never gave me the papers, the boss kept them. Without a work permit, nobody wanted to hire me,” he said.

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“The company holds your ID, your passport, your money, you don’t have any other choice, so they blackmail you to stay and work for them anyway,” he added.

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Another Pakistani in Romania gave details about the accommodation that he and his colleagues were given.

The building he showed us through a video call currently houses around 40 people, but that number could well grow to around 100, with eight to ten men sharing a room.