Countries of origin

I · AT A GLANCE

How each country governs emigration for work

The unit of comparison is the country of origin and its rules for workers who leave through regular channels. The features follow the obligations that international standards place on states of origin: licensing and liability of recruiters, the principle that workers should not pay for their recruitment, contracts and orientation before departure, protection and assistance abroad, redress at home, freedom to leave without discrimination and support on return.

II · COMPARE

Build your own comparison

Choose which features matter for your question by moving the sliders. A weighted comparison appears once you set a weight. Each feature counts 2 when the protection is full, 1 when partial and 0 when absent, following the codebook in section XII.

III · INTERNATIONAL LAYER

Treaties that bind states of origin

The UN migrant workers convention is the only treaty that sets out the duties of states of origin in detail, and four of the eight countries are parties. The ILO conventions on migration for employment, private employment agencies and domestic workers are much less widely ratified; the Philippines is the only country compared that is party to any of them. All eight are parties to CEDAW, whose General Recommendation No. 26 addresses restrictions on women's emigration.

IV · COUNTRY PROFILES

Each country in detail

V · OUTFLOWS

How many workers leave each year

The latest official headline figure for each country. Each figure counts something different (first placements, all deployments including rehires, labor approvals including renewals, or clearances for one category of passport holders), so the bars show orders of magnitude, not a like-for-like comparison.

VI · FRAMEWORKS AND AGREEMENTS

The normative framework, by level and nature

Instruments the eight countries have entered into on labor migration, classified by level (international, regional, interregional, bilateral) and by nature. Most bilateral instruments are memoranda of understanding with a destination country. Click a cell in the map to filter the list.

Bilateral instruments with the main destinations

Years in which an instrument was signed. A dot means none on record, not that none exists; hover over a year for the title.

A memorandum of understanding usually creates no binding legal obligation; a treaty or agreement does once in force. Dates are as reported and should be checked against each foreign ministry's treaty list; several instruments have been renewed or replaced.

VII · LAWS AND POLICIES

Laws and policies, with links to the official sources

The statutes, regulations and policy documents that govern emigration for work in each country. Links lead to the official legislation database or the responsible authority, where the title or original-language title can be searched. Official English translations are for reference; the original-language text prevails.

VIII · PROTECTION FROM VIOLENCE

Protection from violence: legal and policy provisions

Violence can occur at every stage of migration for work: in recruitment, at the workplace, in detention and on return. A country of origin cannot legislate for workplaces abroad, but international standards place duties on it: to inform and train workers before they leave, to give them consular, legal and shelter assistance while abroad, to repatriate them and their remains, and to punish trafficking at home (ICRMW Article 16(2), CEDAW General Recommendation No. 26, ILO Convention No. 190 and the General Assembly resolutions on violence against women migrant workers). This section codes the provisions each country has made. It is coded separately and is not part of the weighted comparison in section II.

Deaths abroad recorded by countries of origin

Two countries publish yearly counts of workers who died abroad. Causes are rarely established: remains are seldom examined after return, and death certificates issued abroad often give only a general cause. The figures are shown without a breakdown by destination.

Migration status and reporting violence

A synthesis of 31 qualitative studies from Europe, North America, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Africa found that migrants in insecure status, including people whose status is tied to an employer, linked the violence they experienced to that status. Fear of losing status or of removal kept them from reporting or leaving violent situations. The authors conclude that reporting violence must not lead to immigration enforcement against the victim (Innes, Bunce, Manzur and Lewis 2024, Globalization and Health 20:83, doi:10.1186/s12992-024-01085-1).

For countries of origin this points to three provisions that do not depend on the worker's status abroad: shelter and legal assistance at missions open to workers whose permits have lapsed or who have left an employer; help to regularize or transfer status before repatriation; and, in bilateral instruments, clauses that let workers report violence and change employer without losing their status. None of the bilateral instruments listed in section VI has yet been coded for such clauses.

Workers facing violence can contact their mission, the hotlines listed in each country profile, or the organizations in our legal help directory. Survivors who have returned home can still bring claims; see help after you return.

IX · CORRIDORS

Where the workers go

The largest destinations for each country, where an official breakdown by destination was reported. The Gulf states and Malaysia dominate South Asian outflows; Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong dominate those from Southeast Asia.

X · EXPLORE THE DATA

Explore patterns across corridors

Each row is one corridor: a country of origin and a destination. Ask whether corridors covered by a bilateral instrument take a larger share of an origin's workers, or whether Gulf corridors are more often covered. Results show confidence intervals, p-values and a plain reading.

With few corridors and different counting rules in each country, these are descriptive associations, not tests of cause. Large corridors may attract agreements rather than the other way round.

XI · LEGAL DEVELOPMENTS

What changed, and when

XII · METHOD AND CITATION

How the data was built

The unit of analysis is the legal regime a country of origin applies to its citizens who leave for work through regular channels, on paper (de jure), as of the date shown. Binding policy (cabinet decisions, ministerial decisions and circulars) is coded alongside statute because much of emigration governance sits there. Implementation (de facto) is not coded; where reports show a gap between rule and practice, the note to the cell says so. Each cell records its note, its source, the date coded and whether it rests on the primary legal text (P) or on a secondary source or a statutory citation not yet checked against the official text (S).

The levels follow international standards on recruitment and emigration: ICRMW Articles 64 to 68, ILO Convention No. 181 Article 7, the ILO General Principles and Operational Guidelines for Fair Recruitment (2019) and CEDAW General Recommendation No. 26. A higher value means the rule is closer to those standards, not that the country is a safer place to leave from. The "exit" feature codes restrictions on leaving, which governments often adopt as protective measures; the codebook follows the CEDAW Committee in treating restrictions that apply to women only as discriminatory.

Limitations: official legislation databases of the eight countries could not be reached from our collection server, so article numbers come from secondary sources and must be checked; ministerial decisions and circulars change faster than statutes and some current positions (for example Indonesia's 2015 placement halt and Nepal's rules on domestic work) could not be confirmed; outflow figures follow different national counting rules.

Reliability and replication

• Coding protocol: one coder applied the rules above to 72 cells (8 countries × 9 features) and to 48 cells on protection from violence (8 × 6). A second, independent coding of all cells against the primary texts is planned, with agreement reported as Cohen's kappa and disagreements resolved against the text. Until then every cell is marked S and should be treated as provisional.
• Corridor analyses treat each origin–destination pair as a case. Pairs from one origin are not independent and each origin counts outflows differently, so the presets use the share of the origin's own outflow and include the destination region as a control; the p-values do not correct for clustering and should be read as descriptive.
• Many tests can be run on the same data. Treat any single significant result as a lead to investigate, not a finding; the statistics engine applies Holm's correction to pairwise comparisons.
• Any weighted comparison depends on the weights chosen. The stability check under the comparison shows how often each country scores highest across 10,000 random weightings.
• Replication files: the codebook, every coded cell with its note and source, treaty status, instruments, laws and policies, protection from violence, outflows, corridors and developments can be downloaded below as CSV and JSON. Each release carries a version number and a dated change log.

How to cite

XIII · FROM RESEARCH TO PRACTICE

From research to practice

Each country profile above lists the arguments the law opens and the avenues for using them, with a printable one-page brief. Claims against a recruitment agency are often easier to bring at home than abroad, and several countries give a specialized body the power to order compensation. For the destination side, see the comparisons of the Gulf States and East Asia.

XIV · SOURCES AND DOWNLOADS

Sources and downloads

Static CSV files: Coded cells with notes and sources · Codebook · Treaty status · Instruments · Laws and policies · Outflows · Corridors · Protection from violence · Legal developments · BibTeX. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

This page summarizes laws and policies for research and advocacy. It is not legal advice. Found a mistake? Write to secretariat@theimr.org.