News Desk
Mueen Mia does not remember exactly when he stopped worrying about the passport.
It disappeared sometime in the first few months. Maybe it slipped out of his bag. Maybe someone in the room took it. He is not sure. What he is sure about is what happened next: nothing. He stayed. Found work. Sent money home. Five years passed.
He is standing near Zikra Mosque, watching the street. Not hiding, just waiting — for someone to call, for someone to walk over and ask if he can fix something, carry something, clean something. Yesterday he got a call about a broken air conditioner. He fixed it. Today he is hoping for the same.
“I don’t do bad things,” he says. “I work. People call me. I go and fix. That is all.”
Mueen is Bangladeshi, one of tens of thousands who came to the Maldives on short visas and stayed longer than the paperwork allowed. He came five years ago with a tourist visa, a small bag and a phone number for a friend who said there was work somewhere in the city. There was.
Not all of them came by choice or stayed by choice. Beside him on some days are men like Muzaffar and Shamsul Huda, whose stories are harder. They were brought over by contractors, promised work and wages on construction projects. When the projects ended, the contractors disappeared. The salaries were never paid. No ticket home, no employer, no papers. They were told to find their own way. They are still finding it.
In the beginning Mueen carried cement, cleaned apartments, unloaded boats. Then an employer noticed he was quick with his hands. Someone taught him to fix air conditioners. Someone else showed him basic electrical wiring. He picked it up fast. Now he earns more than he ever expected when he left Bangladesh.
His employer takes a third of everything. Mueen does not complain.
“He keeps me safe,” he says. “I work. It is okay.”
His expenses in Male’ are small. He shares a room with other workers and eats rice and lentils most days. Almost everything he earns goes home — not through a bank transfer but through a cash card his employer gave him. He sent the card to his family in Bangladesh. They use it to withdraw what they need.
“They take what they need,” he says. “I don’t need much here.”
His daughter is studying. His son is finishing school. He figures he needs a few more years.
Those few more years are no longer guaranteed — and the government’s patience with people in his situation is running out.
Workers like Mueen sit entirely outside the formal economy. They pay no income tax, no GST, no remittance tax and no work permit fees. The money they earn leaves the country through informal channels — cash cards, hawala networks, hand-carried cash — none of it captured by the banking system or taxed at the point of transfer. Many access subsidised goods the state provides for residents, from fuel to rationed essentials, without contributing to the revenue that pays for them. Every dollar moving through these informal channels bypasses the Maldives Monetary Authority and does not return to the foreign currency pool the government is now working hard to protect.
The government launched Operation Karangi in May 2024 — a nationwide enforcement drive to identify undocumented foreign workers, collect biometric data and remove those living or working in the Maldives without papers. Over the months that followed, authorities fingerprinted and photographed 191,723 foreigners, which the government says is 98 per cent of all foreigners who arrived in recent years. The remaining 4,040 are now the focus.
Homeland Security Minister Ali Ihsan said those 4,040 have not submitted biometrics and are people the state cannot properly account for. The operation has moved into its third phase: finding, arresting and deporting those without papers.
“We will search the whole country,” Ihsan said. He named L. Gan, K. Kashidhoo and Aa. Thoddoo — larger islands with vast agricultural lands where he said some workers have lived and worked for years without registering. He spoke of people who died in boat accidents and fires who could not be identified because the state had no record of them.
President Muizzu, speaking at a public meeting, said when his government took office only 20 per cent of the foreign workforce was compliant with regulations. That figure has risen to 63 per cent, but 34 per cent still do not comply. He said around 200,000 foreigners are currently in the Maldives, a number that has grown sharply alongside what he called a rise in illegal trade and unregulated labour.
“The businesses that people have been doing are disappearing. Small businesses in particular,” he said. “We do not want our economy to be harmed by foreigners who were illegally brought into the workforce.”
The target list includes people running coffee joints, barber shops, cycle washes and farm work — the same kind of work Mueen and the men around him pick up day to day.
Mueen listens to these announcements on his phone. He knows they are talking about people like him.
“If they send me back, what can I do,” he says. Not a question exactly. More like something he has already settled in his own mind. “I will go.”
He looks at his hands for a moment. Hands that can now strip and reassemble an air conditioning unit in under an hour, that know the wiring layouts of half the flats in the neighbourhood.
“I only want to finish my work,” he says. “Some more years. That is all I need.”
The crackdown will find some people like Mueen. It will miss others. But in a city that runs largely on labour it imports — and where human trafficking cases surface with troubling regularity — his situation is not exceptional. It is just quieter than most.
