By LARA JAKES | AP
KARBALA, Iraq: At times, as he describes how he sleeps on the floor of the store where he works or misses the family he left in Nepal to find a job, Mohan Rai punctuates his gloomy tale with a laugh.
He tries to make light of the misery he shares with the thousands of foreign laborers who have spent their life savings to get to Iraq to do the country’s dirty work.
The brutal punchline: Rai and his colleagues face deportation with little, if any, profit to show for years of hardship.
The problem of illegal migrant workers is not unique to Iraq, says the labor minister, Nasser Al-Rubaie. Even the United States, he says, grapples with severe difficulties over illegal immigration. But in Iraq, where the specter of violence still hangs over even its holiest cities, there is scant hope for immigrants seeking a better life in a new homeland.
With 900,000 Iraqis unemployed, the government has little sympathy for foreigners who have flocked here to take menial jobs as housekeepers or restaurant workers. And, to get here, authorities say immigrants are routinely fleeced by employment agencies who charge thousands of dollars for flights and temporary visas for workers who wind up earning only a few hundred dollars each month.
“When I am in Nepal, they tell me I will be paid $600 a week,” Rai, 33, said last month at the clothing store in Karbala, 90 km south of Baghdad, where he works and lives. “When I get here, $300 a month.