The Maldives government is working to re-establish a regulated agency-based system for bringing foreign workers into the country, Minister of Homeland Security, Labour and Skills Ali Ihusan has announced, citing two decades of systemic abuse in the existing recruitment framework.
Speaking on the long-standing challenges surrounding migrant labour, the minister said agencies previously handled the recruitment of foreign workers into the Maldives, but their role was significantly curtailed between 2005 and 2012. That shift, he explained, opened the door for employers and individual foreign workers to sponsor recruitment directly, creating loopholes that have been widely exploited.
According to the minister, the current system has allowed unscrupulous actors to charge incoming workers between 3,000 and 15,000 US dollars to secure employment in the Maldives. Once these workers arrive, he added, there is often no identifiable party responsible for them, leaving many in precarious circumstances and outside the protection of regulatory oversight.
“This was being run dangerously and abusively. We believe these standards need to be established in the Maldives as well. One thing is that bringing in workers through anyone other than registered agents must come to a complete stop at a certain point. We are gradually discussing this with business owners, and they too accept that this must be done according to a proper standard,” the minister said.
Ihusan noted that under international norms, the recruitment fee charged to an incoming foreign worker should not exceed the equivalent of one month’s salary at the wage agreed for their employment. To deliver a sustainable solution, he said the government intends to establish licensed recruitment agencies, introduce an auditing system for those agencies, and codify in law the manner in which they may generate revenue.
The minister said the new agency-based framework will be rolled out once the government’s ongoing Kurangi Operation concludes. The operation is a large-scale enforcement effort targeting undocumented foreign workers, regularising those eligible and deporting those who fail to comply with immigration rules.
Once the new system is in place, the minister said, parties bringing foreign workers into the Maldives will be held accountable under a clear legal framework, narrowing the scope for regulatory violations. He added that by the end of the current administration’s term, the Maldives will stand as a model country in the management of foreign labour.
