"Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,

look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:

we cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now."

(From “Refugee Blues” by WH Auden)

A river never looks the same twice. In the monsoon, it swells, restless and dangerous, carrying away crops, houses, sometimes whole villages. In winter, it shrinks into sandbanks, meandering lazily as if it had forgotten its own fury. People who live by rivers know this: water cannot be controlled, only endured. Migration is much like that. At first, it begins quietly, a young man leaving his field to work a season in town, or a sailor setting out on a foreign ship. But as the currents gather force, poverty, war, and climate change, it becomes unstoppable, sweeping families and communities far from the soil where they were born. For Bangladesh, this comparison is more than a metaphor. Migration is the country’s living river, sometimes a lifeline, sometimes a flood.

That river has been swelling again. In August 2025, a US military aircraft landed in Dhaka carrying 39 Bangladeshi men. In September, another 30 arrived in the same way. They had once left with their families’ blessings and their villages’ hopes stitched into their pockets. They had sold plots of land, pawned gold jewellery and borrowed from moneylenders. They crossed oceans on the belief that hard work would mean a better life for those waiting at home. Instead, they came back shackled, marked like criminals, carrying only debts and humiliation. The planes did not just bring back men; they delivered a message. In a world that needs cheap labour but fears the migrant body, Bangladeshis are pushed out by necessity and pulled back by force.

Leaving home has always been part of this land’s story. In the 17th century, Sylhet’s seafarers worked in London’s docks, and Chittagong’s sailors served on British ships. The Liberation War of 1971 uprooted millions, forcing them into refugee camps across borders. Migration is in the blood of the delta, shaped by empires and wars. But the departures of today are quieter and more merciless. It is the violence of absences: jobs that never appear, wages that vanish in inflation, land swallowed by salt and rising seas. Farmers in Khulna watch their rice fields turn brackish. Families in Gaibandha lose homes to rivers that eat the banks each year. Cyclones tear apart tin roofs faster than families can rebuild them. Displaced, they move to Dhaka, a city already heaving under its own weight. In its alleys, brokers wait with their promises. For many, the choice is not between safety and danger but between one danger and another.

The journeys that follow are rarely straightforward. Libya has become one of the most brutal waypoints. More than 21,000 Bangladeshis were identified there in 2023, many of whom were funnelled through by traffickers who promised Europe but delivered cages. In August 2025, 175 men returned from Benghazi’s Ganfuda Detention Centre, their bodies scarred, their spirits crushed. They told stories of being beaten in secret compounds, locked away without food, tortured until families sent more money. Those who could not pay languished in cells or were forced onto unseaworthy boats. The Mediterranean swallowed many whose names will never be recorded.

Others took a westward gamble through the Darién Gap in Panama. The name evokes geography, but the reality is a jungle so dense that it feels endless. There are snakes, rivers that flood in minutes, and gangs that wait in ambush. Migrants stagger through mud with little more than water bottles and hope. A handful reached the US border, but many were caught, denied asylum and sent back in chains. The August and September deportations were only the latest chapter in this cycle. For each man who returns, months of pain are erased with a single flight, leaving him back where he started, only poorer and more broken.

The return is often harder than the leaving. A man who sold his family’s land to pay smugglers cannot arrive empty-handed. Yet that is what most deportees face: no money, no prospects, and creditors waiting at their doors. Research shows nearly three-quarters of deportees intend to try again. This is not foolishness but survival. Debts grow in interest every month. Families need food and shelter. Deportation does not break the cycle; it resets it.

There are programmes meant to help. Bangladesh, with support from the International Organisation for Migration and others, offers training, small grants and counselling. Some men learn new trades, start small businesses, or find jobs. A few rebuild. But these stories are exceptions. Training cannot erase the pressure of debt. Counselling cannot feed a family. The scale of the crisis is too vast for piecemeal remedies. What is missing is recognition that many of these migrants are not leaving for adventure or greed, but out of necessity. Climate change is making the ground beneath their feet unliveable. By 2050, as many as 20 million Bangladeshis could be uprooted. The world can pretend these people are simply “economic migrants”, but the truth is harsher: they are climate exiles, punished twice. Once by the waters that swallowed their homes, and again by the borders that refuse them entry.

Migration is not a crime. It is the last language of survival. To shackle men on their way home is to bind not just their wrists but their dignity. Breaking this cycle requires more than charity. It demands jobs and opportunities at home, but also honesty from the world outside. The wealthier nations, whose carbon emissions have deepened Bangladesh’s climate crisis, cannot wash their hands of responsibility. If borders remain closed and deportations continue without reintegration, the river will only swell, carrying more lives into danger. Until dignity is restored, the story of Bangladesh’s migrants will remain unfinished. They will keep leaving, keep risking, keep returning and leaving again. Like a river pressing against its banks, they will not stop until they find an ocean that accepts them. The question is whether the world will meet them with compassion, or whether it will go on turning them back in chains.

The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at IUBAT and pursuing a Master’s in Human Rights and Multiculturalism at University of South Eastern Norway