Migration from Sri Lanka has its agreeable and disagreeable sides. On the one hand, the workers’ remittances are a great help, but on the other, illegal migration shows the country in poor light and the flight of qualified personnel hurts an already weakened economy.
Historically, migration from Sri Lanka has always reflected the conditions prevailing in the country and the world around it. Both “push” and “pull” factors worked in each wave.
In the first half of the 20 th. Century, a number of educated Jaffna Tamils migrated to Malaya and Singapore to serve in British commercial and governmental establishments as white-collar workers that required fluency in English. The good missionary-run Jaffna schools had given them the required skills and there were opportunities for employment in British Asia.
Ceylon’s independence from British rule in 1948, and especially after the adoption of the ‘Sinhala Only’ policy in 1956 and the rapid Sinhalization of the administration, Eurasians, especially the Dutch Burghers, who had held respectable positions under the British, feared marginalization and left for Australia. The “White Australia” policy on the other end, helped them get in there.
The economic shortages of the Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s socialist era of the 1960s led to some educated Lankans seeking greener pastures outside. The opening up of the economy in 1977 halted that trend, but not for long. The ethnic conflict and the war that dominated the 1980s and 1990, led to hundreds of thousands of minority Tamils fleeing the country. The opening up of the oil-rich Middle East to migrants at that time helped boost Sinhalese and Muslim migration. The economic crisis which appeared as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s mismanagement of the economy in 2020-21, triggered the current surge in migration of all sections of Sri Lankans. The reopening of world economies post-pandemic is helping migration.
Benefits of Migration
Emigration has both contributed to and has been a drag on the country’s economy. Looking at the positive side first, workers’ remittances have been contributing a lot to the economy. According to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) workers’ remittances have covered around 80% of the annual trade deficit over the past two decades. In 2018, remittances amounted to US$ 7 billion, accounting for 8.8% of the GDP. Even in 2021, it was US$ 5.49 billion.
But mismanagement of the economy by successive Lankan governments has led to an undesirable form of migration – of educated professionals. Such migrations deprive the economy of invaluable services and deny the country a just return on the huge investment in free education from the school to the university level. The other drawback is that, unlike workers’ migration, the migration of professionals does not result in remittances.
In her 2022 paper entitled Strengthening Active Labor: Market Policies to Drive an Inclusive Recovery in Asia, Poongothai Venuganan of the Asian Development Bank Institute, says that between January and September 2022, over 222,000 people had left the country for foreign employment, of which approximately 30% were skilled workers.
“As the majority, if not the entirety, of these workers would have benefited from the free education and health system, such migration is an irreparable loss to the economy in terms of the high levels of investment made which the economy has not reaped. While this exodus is triggered by the loss of macroeconomic stability, this trend of departures can cause a vicious cycle of worsening instability as continued outward migration will result in the continuous dwindling of skill availability and the economy’s potential, leading to further deterioration of macroeconomic stability, which can trigger another round of accelerated labour exits and so on,” she says.
Going further, Venuganan points out that since Sri Lanka’s labour market provides little leeway for attracting foreign talent from elsewhere, this outward labour migration will likely hinder the recovery process in the near term and the subsequent progress of the economy into a middle-income one in the medium run.
According to the Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA), nearly 500 doctors had left till August 2022. But the problem of doctors fleeing Sri Lanka is not new. In their 2013 paper on the Migration of Sri Lankan medical specialists Pubudu De Silva, Isurujith Kongala Liyanage, S Terrance GR De Silva and Mahesha B Jayawardana said that from a total of 1,915 specialists who left Sri Lanka for training, 215 (11%) did not return due to push and pull factors. The top reasons for the migration of doctors were: better quality of life abroad; having to work in rural parts of Sri Lanka, career development and social security.
Sri Lanka could lose its IT personnel too. The IT sector here employs 120,000 people and had earned US$ 1.6 billion in export revenue in 2019.
Illegal Migration
Sri Lanka is also known for illegal migration. Recently, more than 300 Sri Lankans were rescued from the waters of the Truong Sa archipelago. The Sri Lanka’s Navy had caught eight boats with 351 migrants on board off the eastern coast. The navy keeps catching such illegal migrants but to no avail. The urge to flee the country at any cost is very strong now because of the 60 to 100% inflation and lack of jobs.
Migrants find it worthwhile paying millions of rupees to human smugglers even if their boats are primitive and overloaded. Their promised land appears to be Australia. A report by the Australian Crime Commission published in 2013 stated that Sri Lanka was among the top four sources of asylum seekers arriving by boat. The boat people head for Australia though they are not welcome there at all.
But as border protection measures are strengthened, smugglers are resorting to risky methods of transporting migrants, thereby endangering their lives, points out Chandana Karunaratne of the Institute of Policy Studies in his 2013 paper. Many deaths occur during these journeys. An estimated 2,000 irregular migrants perished at sea every year, according to Karunaratne’s paper.
Sri Lankan illegal migrants have been heading for Europe too. There were between 1.9 and 3.8 million irregular Sri Lankan migrants in the European Union, constituting 7 to 13% of the overall migrant population, Karunaratne says.
“In the European Union, the most popular destinations for undocumented Sri Lankan nationals seeking residency and/or work opportunities through irregular means were the UK, France, and the Netherlands, as of 2010. The most number of cases of undocumented Sri Lankan nationals who had been ordered to leave was recorded in the UK. Out of the 1,685 undocumented nationals, only 46% departed the UK of their own free will. Likewise, in France, a total of 1,080 undocumented nationals were ordered to leave, out of which a mere 10% departed of their own free will,” the researcher found.
Canada is another popular destination for irregular Sri Lankan migrants, he says. “The extensive coastline enables people smugglers to target several points of entry, but a primary hotspot for irregular maritime arrivals is off Vancouver Island on the western coast. In one well-documented incident that occurred in October 2009, Vancouver Island played host to 76 irregular maritime arrivals of Sri Lankan nationals. In another incident, one which helped change Canada’s refugee policy, 492 Sri Lankan nationals arrived off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia in August 2010.”
Official sources in Canada indicated that there were 635 recorded cases of Sri Lankan nationals seeking asylum in 2011.The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the predominant nationality of maritime arrivals on the western coast of Canada, after having crossed the North Pacific Ocean from South East Asia, was Sri Lankan, Karunaratne notes.
