Equidem CEO Mustafa Qadri Calls for Worker-Centred Approach to Irregular Migration at Bali Process Workshop
At a Bali Process workshop on ’Addressing Irregular Migration: Perspectives and Lessons Learned from Regularisation Programmes’, Equidem Founder and CEO Mustafa Qadri spoke about why irregular migration cannot be understood or addressed only through an enforcement lens.
Drawing on Equidem’s work with migrant workers across major migration corridors, Mustafa highlighted three critical issues:
🔹 Irregularity is often produced by the migration and labour system itself.
Workers may set out to migrate through regular channels, but recruitment abuse, excessive fees or barriers to changing employers can push them into undocumented situations.
🔹 Irregular status can create conditions in which exploitation thrives.
Fear of detention, deportation or losing a livelihood can make it much harder for workers to challenge wage theft, unsafe conditions and other abuses.
🔹 Enforcement alone does not address the demand for migrant labour.
Many industries continue to depend heavily on migrant workers, while enforcement-focused responses can leave the underlying labour demand and exploitative practices untouched.
As Mustafa stressed, migrant workers should not be seen as peripheral to our economies — they sustain essential services and industries across countries.
What is needed is a more effective and humane approach that protects their rights and asks a more fundamental question: how do we shift power away from systems that profit from worker vulnerability and towards workers themselves?
