Effects of migration of women to Middle East countries: Case of Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Migration is the movement of people from one place to another place for the purpose of permanent or semi-permanent residences across a political boundary. There are about 214 million estimated international migrants in the world today and among them 49% are women of the global population. More than 60,000 of Sri Lankan women are working in Middle East countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain and Qatar as housemaids. The purpose of this study is to identify the effects of migration of Sri Lankan women to Middle East countries. The number of Sri Lankan women who are migrating as house maids to Middle East countries was increased after the introduction of open economy system to Sri Lanka in 1977.Therefore,it has both micro and macro level impacts to the development of Sri Lanka in international arena. In this study I wish to examine that what is the women migration, what are the push and pull factors, how it be affected to the Sri Lankan perspectives and why it is became as a severe crisis for the development process of the Sri Lanka. Here, I used secondary data which is appropriate topic and consider qualitative data analysis. The study shows that the current situation of the migration of Sri Lankan women to Middle East countries and its impacts for the Sri Lanka. There are some push and pull factors which are motivate women to migrate as housemaids to Middle East countries. The research concludes that the impacts of migration of women which are related to the Sri Lankan economic, cultural, social and political contexts and the main impact is that, it can break up the family and it will lead to social upheaval without a mother at home. And also it could affect to the image of Sri Lanka and women of Sri Lanka within other countries. In the case of 'Rizana' we realized that how dangerous women migration of Sri Lanka to Middle East countries. However, until today migration of women plays the key role as the main income source in the economy of Sri Lanka.