Nawras is my friend. And he is a character in a story. I am his friend and I am a journalist documenting his life. Those facts coexist in the same space and neither one fully explains the other, nor can either be teased apart from the other. And so that muddles things at times, the stakes jack up higher.

For example, there was a moment during my trip to see him when we were out with his friends, all sitting around the table eating shawarma and chips, talking and laughing and bullshitting. The conversation was easy, everyone taking the piss out of the other, and then it moved to politics, the current state of the country, what was working well, what wasn’t, and something in me clicked over. I sat up a little straighter, tasted the shawarma a little less, and started noting who said what and how, watching faces, tracking disagreements, and very quickly I was on the outside, a journalist looking in, no longer the friend chatting rubbish, and the distance between those two things felt tiny and enormous, somehow honest and deceitful.

I wrote about an aspect of this dynamic in the Behind The Scenes from Bangladesh where I described the experience of sitting with Mohammed as he told me he wanted to die, of listening and caring and also, on some very real level, evaluating his pain against the story I was trying to tell. That tension was acute and immediate, but it happened with a stranger and when the interview was over, so was the tension, and it was just me exhaling in a room before moving onto the next interview.

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With Nawras that tension is different. It doesn’t happen in a 50 minute interview, but over years, the slow, low-grade hum of a relationship that is always, on some level, also professional. And that hum doesn’t stop when the recorder is off or the camera is tucked away. It’s there when we’re on the phone and he tells me about his sister’s increasingly precarious life in Turkey and I feel sad but also, somewhere in the background, a series of thoughts flicker, wondering how it connects to themes in the story, what it says about the cost of displacement over time, about the family members left behind. That flicker annoys the shit out of me. But it’s there. Not because I’m callous but because I’ve told my brain to always connect the dots. And that doesn’t switch off just because I care. The caring and the cataloging coexist.

In the feature story I wrote about how my first trip to see Nawras in 2017 fell through. And what I didn’t fully understand back then, but what I think I understand better now, is that the friction wasn’t really about journalism. It was about power. In 2017 Nawras cared about me and felt grateful for things I’d done during his travel to Sweden and so didn’t feel entirely free to say no. He found a way to say it anyway, through his mother, through the situation, but the directness wasn’t there yet.

In 2025, when a family member fell ill and the timing of my trip fell apart, he told me straight up. And when I arrived a month later he set clear boundaries. His mother’s home, for example, doesn’t appear in the story at all because she wasn’t comfortable with it.

I respected that. But I can’t pretend it didn’t hurt at times. Because as a friend it made me feel untrusted, kept at arms length from the fullness of his life. And as a journalist I knew there were elements there, the domestic intimacy, the family dynamics, the care his mother takes packing food for him when he goes to the clinic, that would make the story richer, more textured, more full. Without those things you see Nawras’ professional life. You see the doctor, the student, the young man at work. You don’t see the son, the brother. That frustrated me. And feeling that frustration made me feel like shit because it highlighted the very reasons not to trust me in the first place. It illustrated the very ways I was different from a normal friend.

But that frustration, that friction between respecting his boundaries and wanting more, is maybe one of the more important things about this story. Because in the main piece I argue that arrival, real arrival, is the ability to fully assess and be confident enough in your place to say no. The ability to protect your life because it’s yours to protect. And Nawras’ growing ability to set those boundaries, to decide what I could see and what I couldn’t, to let me in on his terms rather than mine, is itself the evidence of everything the story is about. His boundaries made the story less complete, but they also make the story more demonstrative, more true to him and where he’s at.

Here is a life. His life. Nobody else’s. Not Sweden’s, not Syria’s, not the war’s, not the media’s. And so yeah, in some ways the friendship cannibalizes some of the story, because the power is more equal, because I’m not leveraging hospitality in the same way, because as we get more comfortable with each other, ‘no’ comes more freely. And so those limits, yeah, they’re annoying. The journalist in me doesn’t like them, but the friend in me is thankful for them. It means something is working. It means we’re being honest about the prying part of my journalism and there’s enough trust in our friendship to shut it down. It means Nawras can trust that our relationship can digest disappointment even when that disappointment is itself rooted in a lack of trust.

But I can only describe this from my side. I don’t know what it costs him to navigate the other side of that. To be friends with someone who is also, always, writing about you. To call me a big brother and know that I’m also taking notes.

He was glad I was there. But he was also aware that everything he told me had two audiences. Me and you. And so I think there’s always an additional layer kept up, one membrane of protection between the version of himself he shared with a friend and the version that would end up on the page. And that makes total sense. He’s a young man who has spent much of the last 12 years understanding how precarious life can be and that a lot can be determined by how much you let people in and how much of yourself you give. Who has learned that relationships carry weight, actions have consequences, and that nothing is a given so tread lightly, be deliberate, think it through.

Because I think that warmth is real. But I can also see the ways it would be strategic for it to appear as such. Maybe a journalist who feels like a friend is a journalist more apt to write kindly. A journalist who feels trusted might be a journalist more inclined to protect you. And Nawras is smart enough to know that even if he’s never consciously put his finger on it.

Because I myself feel my own version of that. I understand the currency of that warmth. And I hate that. God I hate that. Because I know that when I check in on his mom or ask about his sister or send him a message on a random Tuesday just to see how he’s doing I mean it, every single time, but I can’t pretend like it also doesn’t maintain something, keep a channel open, keep him feeling safe enough to let me in, and I don’t know where the caring stops and the maintaining begins. And I don’t think there’s a line. They are the same thing because I’m the same person. And so I go out of my way to ensure he understands me as fair, as honest, as truly a friend, which in itself, may be its own act of dishonesty.

Since I left Sweden, life has kept going for both of us. Nawras graduated. He landed his internship. He’s a doctor now, and I am proud of him in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with this story and everything to do with the fact that I have watched this kid become a man, watched him go after a dream that he’s had since he was 13, watched him work and struggle and fight for it, every piece of it, and made it happen. He’s done it. And that is rare.

We message. We talk. And he’ll read this. He’ll have thoughts I’m sure. And we’ll chat, and the conversation may be complicated, because I’ll have done the whole thing all over again. I’ll have written about him, about us, about the difficulty of writing about him. Because this piece will itself be another act of turning our friendship into material, and there may be some stumbling or even quiet recognition in the complex nature of our conversation when we speak, some acknowledgment that I can’t write about the complexity of our relationship without adding to it. That I can’t add to our relationship without contemplating how I’m going to write about it. That I’m always inside it all, friendship and story, and how he knows that.

And that’s the thing about not leaving. The story doesn’t end because the friendship doesn’t end and the friendship doesn’t end because somewhere along the way, between the port in Sicily and the clinic in Vimmerby, between the boy who needed to borrow my phone and the man who bought me dinner last time we hung out, it stopped being straight journalism and started being life, started being something shared. It was always both. But knowing Nawras the way I do, having watched his life unfold over a decade rather than glimpsed in an afternoon, has widened the aperture a little, and so there’s more light, more depth behind the person sitting across from me, the full weight of a life that exists before I arrive and will carry on long after I leave.

And if I’m really being honest that kinda fucks with me because it also lets me see how shallow my understanding has sometimes been, how tied to me, master-of-my-own-movie, it’s been. How I have treated people as characters in a story I’m writing first and people in a life second. Not out of malice but necessity, speed. Out of the limits of what a stranger can know in the time a story allows.

But Nawras gave me time. And with that I got to see someone move from character to friend, friend to whole person with a complicated life, and back to character, back to friend. And seeing the porosity of those personas makes me ever so slightly more aware of how much I miss, how much life and complexity and depth is always going on in the background of what I can see. How much work I have yet to do.

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He’s from Suwayda, a city in the south of the country. It was a liberal place in many ways, where every house had musicians and poets, and he remembers walking down the streets at night, listening to music stream out the front doors of his neighbors’ homes, a place where families pinched pennies where possible in order to teach their children music. By six he was squirreling away his own pocket money to buy bootleg cassette tapes of Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. His grandfather, a sheikh, made wine in the basement of a centuries-old Roman church.

He left Syria in 2014 as the war ripped the country from the inside out. He made his way to Sweden and while waiting for asylum bought a broken oud, took it apart, and tuned it back together. Within weeks, a Swedish band heard him play and asked him to join.

The first home he lived in after receiving asylum was a massive thirteen-room house in a forest near Linköping. The owner warned him of ghosts, but Fadi told him that ghosts were better than humans.

When the electricity went out for a month, he played by candlelight every night. He says it was the most balanced he has ever been.

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During the course of reporting I spoke with many others who had made their own journeys to Sweden. People who were actively negotiating their own bargain, weighing what it cost and what it gave, and what that meant to who they wanted to be. I’m grateful to them for opening up their homes and busy schedules to sit with me and talk. What follows are excerpts from those conversations.

Many of these conversations happened because of journalists Mina Demian (who also appears in the piece) and Alex Rodallec. My thanks to them both.

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Nawras Soukhta speaks Swedish with an ease that catches me off guard. A flowing, unthinking fluency of someone who lives inside a language, thoughts spilling out in their melodic rise and fall during unremarkable exchanges that no one notices, nor is supposed to. The greeting to a nurse as he passes in the hall, the joke to the receptionist about a scheduling mix-up, the quick back and forth with a colleague about a patient he's referring, all of it moving without thought or hesitation or any sign that this was once foreign, that these rounded vowels and swaying lilt were once shapes and rhythms he had to learn to make.

He is 26. Solidly built, stubble darkening his jaw, a stethoscope slung around his neck, and there is a lightness to him, something buoyant in the way he moves through the hallways and offices and break room with its bad coffee and cluttered notice board, all of it absorbed into the rhythm of a regular working day here in Vimmerby, this small town in southern Sweden.

We arrive at the examination room and his patient, a construction worker with a nail through his hand, is waiting. Nawras opens the door, introduces himself and within seconds the two of them are joking, the construction worker laughing at how sideways his Monday morning has gone, Nawras peppering in questions as he pulls on latex gloves and lays him down. He cuts away the work glove, presses gently along the fingers, checking for nerve damage. Before the man has even finished a story about his foreman Nawras is sitting him back up. He’ll need to go to the regional hospital, there’s some numbness and he wants it examined closer before the nail is taken out. He calls a nurse, gives the man’s shoulder a squeeze and walks out. There are other patients to see.

Nawras is a final-year medical student, a few short months away from finishing his clinical rotation, graduating, becoming a doctor, and entering the chapter he has been writing his way towards for over a decade, since he was a wiry thirteen-year-old sitting beside his father’s bed in Syria shortly before he died, as he told him he’d make a good doctor, to try, as he told him to take care of the family, to keep going.

And he has. Since then he has escaped Syria, stolen himself alone across stormy Mediterranean seas, criss-crossed Europe, learned a new culture, a new language, navigated endless bureaucracy, reunited his family, thrown himself into school and community, graduated valedictorian, become a Swedish citizen, made it into medical school, poured himself into textbooks and practicals and thousands of coffee-fueled hours studying late into the night, and is now here, treating patients in a country that took him in as a boy of fifteen, gave him peace and stability and enough space to plan and dream and succeed, and he has, by nearly every metric, he has. He is making it. And he is thankful for that, for how the dice has landed. Thankful for this luck, for family, for god and for this cold country in the north. Because he knows it is rare and he knows it could have been otherwise.

And yet amidst it all he is thinking about leaving.

There’s no plan, no urgency. He hasn’t yet packed his bags or applied for jobs abroad. But the possibility sits with him in a way it didn’t before, this new quiet calculation humming beneath the surface as he weighs what staying looks like against what leaving could offer up.

The first time I met Nawras he was a boy of fifteen standing alone at a crowded port in Sicily. It was October of 2014 and he had just spent eleven days at sea, his body tossed and wrung out by the crossing from Turkey, eleven days hunched in the hull of a leaky wooden boat with close to a hundred other migrants, vomiting, dehydrated, too sick to eat or drink, the hours bleeding into each other and the nagging, gnawing question looping in his mind - will I make it?

His body was slight, bony elbows wider than his biceps, the frame of a teenager who had begun to grow faster than he could feed it. His eyes, dark and kind, scanned the Italian port as he stepped onto land, reading each person he saw, absorbing who could help him, who could hurt him. He approached me and asked to use my phone. He needed to call his mother. To tell her he was alive.

When he was done, we stood by the side of the port’s steep edge, Italian police and red cross workers swirling around as waves crashed below, and we talked. He asked me how far the train station was, whether I knew where the Italian government would take him, whether it was easy to escape. Within a few days I was headed north with him as he traveled to Sweden to claim asylum.

In the years since, we have kept in touch. I have come to care for him. He is my friend. And twice I have tried to come back and tell the story of what he has made of his life. Each time has been complicated.

The second time I came to Sweden was this past September. I came expecting to document the arc from refugee to doctor. The trials and the triumph. To understand the climb from the margins to the middle, what was gained and what was lost along the way. A narrative that would carry a reader from that boy at the port to this man in scrubs, the whole thing tied up with a nice little bow. The reality though was that the lines were not clean and clear the way stories make them out to be. What I found was difficult, complex, beautiful, mundane. It was a life. Not a narrative. Not a story about a refugee, for Nawras was no longer one, and he was done being seen as one. He was willing to talk about the past, but he was done being defined by it. Done being seen as the boy on the boat, the refugee in the system, the newcomer fighting his way in. He was a young Swedish man with a life he had built and fought for, a life he wanted to protect, to define on his terms, to get on with living, not explain, or excavate for someone who, in many ways, still saw him as the kid he used to be.

And in that friction between the story I came for and the life he was actually living, the one he was rightfully guarding, I found something I hadn’t really expected. Something about when we are allowed to simply be the thing we truly are, when we are allowed to move beyond our past, about what it means to outgrow the thing the world has decided you are.

Nawras remembers the silence most. Roughly a week after arriving in Sweden in 2014, he was sent to a tiny village about four hundred kilometers southwest of Stockholm. It was the sound of order and safety, of nothing moving out of sync, but also the quiet of distance and isolation. On the way there he had fallen asleep on the train and remembers looking out the window when the train pulled into the station and he woke, “We were in the middle of the forest and I was like, oh nooo what the fuck? I’m not staying here. It’s empty!” He laughs now, putting his hand to his forehead, “It was so quiet. There was nothing there.”

The center was for unaccompanied minors and it was where he and a few dozen others had been sent to wait out decisions on their asylum applications. He would be there for ten months. And as time extended before him, depression became a daily reality, a force of gravity he and others had to constantly push against.

“It was so hard and lonely,” he says of that time, “and sometimes it felt hopeless. I was like, this isn’t worth it.”

But he had placed his bets and now his task was to wait. Like so many refugees caught in the slow machinery of bureaucracy, he needed to quiet his life, disassemble it and put it on a shelf, ignoring its antsy calls to seize the day.

His two older sisters were a lifeline. They had arrived in Sweden a few months before him and were going through the same emotional rollercoaster in migration centers of their own. Even though their camps were horrible, they kept him focused on the bigger picture. “They would say, ‘don’t be silly, it’s good, everything will be good’, and they’d try to distract me,” Nawras recalls. “They would tell me these miserable stories and they’re laughing. We’d all be laughing.”

He chuckles as he remembers this, but I can see that the effort exhausts something in him, pulls him somewhere lower, more removed.

“How are you doing?” I ask him as we talk, “Did you just get hit by some sadness? Your face and energy just changed. Does chatting about all this bring you back there?”

He pauses, leans back slightly and takes a small breath, slowly closing his eyes, no more than a long blink. “Yeah... yeah, it’s like when you trap some memories and now starting to think about it, it’s like...” He pauses, searching for the words, lifting his hands together, fingertips touching, and spreads them apart in front of his face, like he’s miming a flower blooming or the destructive force of an explosion. “It becomes real again. It took so much energy so even speaking about it... you remember these moments.”

Finally, in August of 2015, ten months after arriving, he got his residency.

“It was like finally being seen. Being seen by the system. I finally existed.”

With papers in hand he threw himself into Swedish, progressing so quickly he skipped a language course and finished high school prep in the minimum time possible. But even as his life moved forward, his mother and three siblings were still in Istanbul, and every day that passed was a day closer to his eighteenth birthday, after which bringing them over would become exponentially harder, if not impossible.

That stress burrowed into his days. He called the migration agency constantly, laid awake at three in the morning staring at the ceiling, mind whirring, repeatedly made the long trip to the migration center in Malmö only to wait for hours and hear nothing. Most of the time they just said wait. He’d call again anyway.

He woke on his eighteenth birthday without news, but midway through the day the phone rang. It was a woman from the migration authority. “Happy birthday,” she said, and told him his mother’s application was finally approved. She said she had known for days but wanted to give him something on his birthday.

“At first I didn’t believe it,” Nawras remembers, “I was texting and calling and emailing so much and for such a long time. So I don’t know...she felt it was like a present. But for me it wasn’t.”

Not all the news was good. The process had taken so long that one of his sisters had aged out and remains in Turkey to this day. The system that once held him still holds her, and there’s nothing he can do but call, listen, and try to help problem-solve the disjointed life she’s had to piece together alone.

It would take months before he felt grounded in this new reality, but he and most of his family now had papers, they had found an apartment, and he was in high school, learning the language and culture and coursework he needed to build the life he wanted. The following summer, after he turned eighteen, he got a job at an elderly care center.

“It was the first time I felt normal,” he says of that time. “Like it was just a normal life. You have friends, we share things, we go to school together, we go to the gym and then we plan things. Like on this day I have an exam so I can’t go out but you can on this day. You know, you’re just like... you’re just normal.”

Life, by and large, isn’t made up of massive peaks and troughs. It’s made up of boring, mundane moments, of beautifully unremarkable acts and events that we are privileged to glide our way through, unaware of the control we’ve exerted to structure them and of the effortless rhythm and routine they collectively give to our lives. Taken together, they are a manifestation of, a statement of, what we want and who we want to be - I make my coffee in a cafetiere and like it black no sugar, I like my eggs sunnyside up and fried in butter, I go to the gym Tuesday and Thursday evenings, I read in bed. They help form our identity and our identity informs them in kind.

When we are forced to flee our home and country, we must often cut connections to community and culture in the process. But the sheer precarity of that new life, that new and uncertain hope, cuts a wound deeper still. “You go out with friends but your mind is thinking about your papers or about your family or the next problem,” Nawras says of that tenuous time waiting, “everywhere you’re somewhere else”. And this mental displacement may be the ultimate toll, stripping away control over not just these quotidian details that build a life and sense of self, but also the very presence of mind to actually inhabit them.

Papers in hand, Nawras began building a life in a country that was changing around him, its politics shifting beneath his feet just as he tried to find solid ground.

For Sweden in 2015 was not the Sweden he would come to know. Back then, as Europe’s self-described migrant crisis reached a fever pitch, Sweden was seen globally as a humanitarian superpower. The previous prime minister had urged Swedes to “open your hearts” to the world’s refugees. The public and its government did, letting in over 80,000 asylum seekers in 2014 and more than 160,000 in 2015, the highest number per capita of any country in the EU. Then reality hit.

Nearly 10,000 migrants were arriving every month and the Swedish Migration Agency had begun to struggle processing applications. Across the country shortages emerged in teachers, interpreters and housing. The country that had built a million affordable homes in the 60s and 70s had basically stopped building, and by 2015 the shortage was dire for refugees and Swedes alike. In the southern city of Malmö, newly arrived refugees were at one point forced to sleep on the streets because no beds could be found.

The strain on the system had become politically untenable and near the end of 2015 the government tapped out. The country needed “respite,” the prime minister conceded. “We simply cannot do any more.” The government instituted temporary border controls with ID checks on all modes of transport between Denmark and Sweden. Permanent resident permits would no longer be the default. Instead, most refugees would receive only temporary permits and the rights to family reunification would be dramatically trimmed down.

The shockwaves seemed to reconfigure the entire political landscape. The intense pressures of the moment shattered old alliances, broke long-standing taboos and accelerated the rise of the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist party that would, over the following ten years, move from political pariah to central power broker.

“It was difficult to see how quickly the politics changed,” Nawras said of that moment when he left the center and began to build a life, “Sweden has given me so much. There were so many kind people that helped me in those early years. But it was also hard to feel that so many others were thinking like this.”

It’s easy to point to 2015 as the year that fractured Swedish society, but the truth is more complex.

For much of the twentieth century, Sweden’s folkhemmet, or “people’s home,” promised cradle-to-grave security funded by a dynamic, privately owned economy. The Swedish state became the central actor in citizens’ lives, fostering what historian Lars Trägårdh calls “statist individualism”, a society where the state empowers individuals by liberating them from traditional dependencies on family, church and community.

But this all-powerful state also cuts the dependencies that build communities. “It allows for Sartre’s perspective - Hell is other people,” Trägårdh told me recently with a chuckle, “why do you want to make contact with other human beings if you don’t have to?”

Equally important, Trägårdh argues, is the understanding that charity has no place in this social contract. It is one of equality and reciprocity. “Citizens work, they pay taxes, they earn rights. It’s not a charity state.” As more asylum seekers arrived, more Swedes felt people were receiving benefits they hadn’t first contributed to and earned. They began to question whether their state was prioritizing them or leaving them behind.

These worries had been quietly growing for years, fed by that same shift in the 1990s that gutted housing, for the steady growth in equality that Sweden had seen for much of the twentieth century had begun to dramatically reverse, driven by tax policies that heavily favored income from assets over labor.

The shift has been stark. Sweden has one of the highest concentrations of billionaires per capita in the world, ahead of Germany, the UK and the US. “This concentration of wealth at the very top fundamentally challenges the Swedish narrative of being a country of equals,” Swedish economist Olle Hammar told me.

Into this mix, Trägårdh argues, came a political moment where both left and right looked outward, focused on globalist agendas, the right on free markets, the left on universal human rights and open borders. “Both sides no longer cared about the nation state,” treating it either as obstacle or vestige, and in turn created political space for the Sweden Democrats, the only party critical of immigration and the only one that “spoke positively about Sweden as a nation state.”

The other parties scrambled to catch up, and as Hammar notes, the overcorrection was dramatic. “Before 2015, politicians were more generous in their immigration policies than the average Swede,” he says. “And now it’s the other way around. Politicians will be much more anti-immigration than the general population.”

It was a perfect storm and the political narrative quickly connected the dots between the new arrivals and the country’s economic woes, a connection that experts say is simply not supported by the data.

“This is one of the most stunning things,” Swedish economist Jesper Roine told me emphatically. “If you look at what has happened to inequality numbers... essentially all of that shift happens in the ‘90s and early 2000s. 2015 is completely invisible in the statistics for this. It has absolutely no effect on overall inequality.”

Migrants didn’t break the Swedish model. They arrived just as the country was discovering it was already broken.

None of which changes the fact that Nawras has a schedule to keep. Back in the clinic, he checks his phone and we walk out of the office to a conference room for a brief orientation with the clinic’s head social worker, Camilla.

Camilla is a blonde, soft-spoken woman in her fifties, and she efficiently runs Nawras through the process of how patients receive the emotional and material support they need even after leaving the examination room. The presentation is short and towards the end it moves into a more informal conversation.

“Some people need so much more beyond medical care,” Nawras says, “A patient might be fine medically, but struggling with life outside. It’s really important what you do.”

Camilla smiles warmly. “It’s true. And I’m sure that with your background, coming here as a refugee, you understand how important this kind of support is.”

The comment hangs in the air for a moment. Nawras nods, offers a polite smile and agrees, “Yes, of course.” The conversation moves on, and a few minutes later we’re walking back through the corridors of the clinic.

Back in his office, Nawras is still wrestling with it. “It felt weird when she said that. I know it didn’t come from a bad place, but it made me question how she saw me,” he reflects, holding onto each end of the stethoscope around his neck, rotating slightly from side to side in his chair. I ask him what he means, what felt off in her comment.

He pauses for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “I don’t see myself as a refugee. I’m not a refugee. I’m not vulnerable and in that place anymore, so when someone reminds me of it... it makes me question whether they see me as that. It kind of puts me back in that place.”

His lips tighten and he fidgets in his chair, scratching his neck, then rubbing his shoulder and upper arm as if his hand needs direction he can’t give.

“I worked so hard to get here. And I want to be proud of what I’ve done, where I’ve come from, but I also want to just be... a doctor. I just want to move forward and start this next chapter.” He pauses. “I’m really grateful for what this country has given me. You know, the people who have helped me get here. But I don’t want to just be seen as someone that Sweden helped.”

He takes a breath and stares into the middle distance for a brief moment, his body still, before his focus clicks back into the day.

There is always a tension between the world’s perception of us and our own. This tension births ambition and fear, indignation and shame, as we so often secret the scars and tout the wins, spinning yarns and thumping chests to convince the world of the things we so want to be true yet fear are not. Nawras is no longer a refugee. He is a Swedish citizen, a medical student, a 26-year-old man with friends and crushes and colleagues he can’t stand. He goes on vacation, stacking photos for the ‘Gram, he pays credit card bills and eats microwavable pizza because he can’t be bothered to cook. He has built a rhythm to his days, his own quietly predictable cadence that gives measure to his life. But he has assembled that normalcy out of painful and extraordinary circumstances, and that past is not easy to leave behind. It is present in Camilla’s comment, in his relentless drive to become a doctor, in the way he bulk buys for his mother to ensure she has enough while he is away, in the way he chats with his sister late into the night, piecing together her fragile life in Turkey.

In the years since Nawras arrived, Sweden has been on its own journey to redefine itself. Heavily influenced by the Sweden Democrats, the government has instituted what it calls a “paradigm shift” on migration, outlined in its Tidö agreement, and pivoted away from humanitarian asylum policies toward prioritizing highly-skilled immigrants, a bet that by filtering for a smaller number of high-income earners it can stabilize the state’s finances.

Under these new rules, a young refugee like Nawras, let alone his family, almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed to stay.

But the gamble cuts against the country’s own interests. For much of the twenty-first century, immigration added roughly half a percentage point to Sweden’s annual economic growth rate, offsetting a low birth rate and aging population while bolstering the tax-paying workforce that funds the comprehensive state support so central to Swedish life and identity. Now the country is staring down the barrel of net emigration for the first time in over half a century. One in three practicing doctors is foreign-born and over half of all new specialist licenses in the past decade went to immigrant doctors. The consequences of losing them are not abstract with a study recently showing that the communities left behind by Swedish doctors saw mortality rates jump by 7 percent.

That pressure is only set to mount as one in five Swedes is already over 65, a share that will rise to one in four within fifteen years.

Sweden doesn’t have an immigration problem. It has a Sweden problem. And that problem creates a paradox at the heart of the country’s identity crisis.

The state is redefining who gets to be Swedish while depending on the very people those definitions threaten to exclude, gambling that it can preserve its welfare model by limiting who joins, even as those limits may undermine the system that model is built upon.

While politicians in Stockholm grapple with what adjustments to make, the future of the Swedish welfare state is being negotiated daily in towns like Vimmerby. In this town of just over 15,000 people, more than 4,000 are over 65. Of the 16 doctors working to care for them, 11 are immigrants, and two of the native Swedes are already retired, clocking in just part time. Here, the future of healthcare, as in much of Sweden, rests squarely on the shoulders of people like Nawras.

Yet Nawras and a number of other foreign-born medical students I spoke with are weighing their options. A future in Sweden is far from a given as they’re pulled by higher salaries and more welcoming environments abroad.

For Nawras, like others, the decision isn’t purely professional. His sister is still in Turkey, at the whims of an administration where she has no permanent status. His mother, a talented professional who raised seven children alone after her husband’s death, has found herself socially isolated in Sweden, her daily rhythm reduced from the expansive one she knew in Damascus to a handful of weekly interactions, sidelined at times by the hijab she wears. But there is also immense gratitude for what the country has given him. And it’s home. The calculation isn’t simple, and one he hasn’t yet made, but such personal factors are at the heart of the matter, shaping whether someone like Nawras stays or goes.

It’s almost painful in how simple a bind it all is. Nawras succeeded on exactly the terms Sweden claimed to want. He learned the language, crushed it in school, and is training for a role the country desperately needs. He worked, he integrated, he paid in. And yet the country that made space for him is now making clear there’s no more room for those like him. Whether Camilla sees it or not, there is truth in her comment. On some level Nawras will always carry his past. The question at play is whether Sweden will see that past as a testament to its success or to its missteps, as justification for closing its borders.

When Nawras and I first video called last year I couldn’t help but smile. We had spoken and exchanged voice notes over the years, but seeing his face, how much he’d grown, was surreal. It’s an obvious thing - of course he’d be older - but it still took me aback to see him as a man, his face full and healthy. We caught up, talked about family and friends, school and work, and I told him the idea of doing another follow-up story. He liked the idea and we were genuinely excited about seeing each other in person after so many years.

But a week later, in another call, the hesitation surfaced. That rational caution anyone feels when someone asks to document their life. That essential question hanging over it all - how much of my life?

“I’m not an open book,” Nawras said. “There are some elements of my private life that I want to keep private. We can talk as friends but there are times when it needs to stay between us as friends.”

I respected that. We were planting flags we hadn’t planted before, defining what was off limits and what was fair game. I told him I would follow his lead. He would determine how much to let me in and how much of that could be documented.

A few weeks later, the day I was supposed to fly out my phone buzzed while I was driving. It was Nawras, and so I pulled over to the side of the road to read the message.

A family member was sick. Nawras had barely slept in days. He didn’t know how much time he’d have for the story. My stomach dropped - for him, for his family, for the stress he was under, and, if I’m honest, for me. This was the first story I was reporting for this publication and a delay would cost time and money and momentum. But there was something else, something I don’t feel good admitting, because as I sat there in the truck, I wasn’t sure it was real. This wasn’t the first time access had fallen apart, and so I wondered if Nawras was trying to say no without having to say no.

When we got on a video call later that day, my doubt evaporated the moment I saw his face. The exhaustion was so clear, the worry so palpable. We talked it through and I decided to delay. I didn’t want to add stress to a stressful time, so I’d rearrange stories, and get up there at a later date.

But the exchange clarified something. Back in 2017, I had flown to see him for the first time. His mother had just arrived and his life was beginning to settle. I wanted to document it. Yet his sister was still stuck in Turkey, her appeal pending, and after two days together I could feel something tightening beneath the surface. On a walk through town one night, Nawras told me it was difficult having me there. His mother felt protective of this fragile thing they were building and they didn’t want to draw attention to their life in a way that might jeopardize his sister’s asylum and their collective future. We decided I should leave.

The decision felt right, and really like the only one to make, but I was disappointed. I don’t think either of us fully understood what was happening in that moment. The same urge to protect was there for him, but the confidence in his life, in his right to guard it, wasn’t yet steady enough to understand it and say it from the outset. And I don’t think I fully grasped what my footprint was, what I was asking of him and his family. That was their life, not my story, and there was a tension between what we each wanted that neither of us had the language for yet.

In 2025, the tension was the same but we could see it more clearly. His life was full and complicated. A sick family member, a job and a family to care for and protect, his own swirl of obligations and responsibilities, worries and hopes, the messy and unglamorous reality of life just being lived. I would need to adjust to that, to respect it, to see it for what it was. His life is not mine to tell. He is its director, and he decides how much of it to let me in on, how much I can share here with you. His family member’s illness, for example, is his and his alone. Other struggles, other private corners of his life are likewise for him, not texture for this.

And this is what arrival looks like. Not the job or the citizenship or the language. Those matter, undoubtedly, but even more is the ability to say no. The ability to set a boundary without apology, to protect your life because it is yours to protect. And it’s the openness to say no to the life you’ve built, the willingness to leave. Because before you arrive you are so focused on getting there that there’s no seeing beyond it. But once you’re there, once you settle and have built something real, something that’s yours that you can hold in your hands and assess and judge clearly without pressure or distraction, and decide whether it’s what you actually want, what you actually need, that may be the clearest sign you have arrived.

Even still, the world doesn’t always honor it. We all carry pasts we’d rather not perform for others, chapters we’ve closed that others keep trying to reopen. For most of us, this is usually a minor frustration. A high school friend who sees you as the reckless teenager of your youth, the family member who won’t let go of who you were at twenty. We get to roll our eyes, change the subject, move on. The world, by and large, gives us more grace to be who we’ve become.

Refugees are not afforded that same space. They become fixed in the public imagination, this headline-making label pinned to their backs, and they remain seen at their most vulnerable, their most desperate, their most dependent. The boat, the camp, the paperwork, the waiting. That is who they are, who they will always be, no matter how many years pass, no matter how much they build, no matter how fully they become something else, the world keeps calling them back to a chapter they have already closed, because even “poor you, look what you have endured” becomes “amazing you, look what you have overcome” and always it is defined by the past, by the pain, its meaning rooted there. And that pain was true and real, but it is also not ours to own, the meaning not ours to design, it is the property of each person who has borne it, who has carried it through the deserts and across seas, who has bled it out through tears and midnight rage and moved on to live something else, become something different. It is theirs to choose.

Sweden is recalibrating who gets to be Swedish. Nawras is deciding whether he wants to keep being Swedish. And I am finishing a story that on a certain level, I’m not sure he wanted told, one that is accurate and incomplete, accurate because what is here is true, incomplete because a life is always more than what we can capture, and because Nawras has the right, as we all do, to tell his own story and to stop telling it when he’s done.

The story about Nawras is not really a story about a refugee. It is a story about a man who was once a refugee and is now something else. It is about a Swedish man, a soon-to-be-minted doctor, a son, a child among seven, a young 26-year-old figuring out his life like anyone else as he applies to his first jobs out of school, catches feelings for a colleague and drives late into summer nights bullshitting with friends, the windows down and the music up. It is a story about a country that opened its doors and then began to close them, that invested in people like Nawras and is now questioning whether people like him are worth it. It is a story about what we owe each other, what we owe ourselves, and who gets to decide when a chapter is finished.

Sitting with him now, back in his office in Vimmerby, I watch as he dictates notes from a patient he has just seen with tinnitus. The man was retired, having worked in a local metalworking factory for over thirty years. For twenty-five of those years he has suffered from a near-constant high-pitched ringing in his ears, the scar of a physical trauma he suffered on the job long ago. He tried all kinds of treatments but nothing worked, and over time it became just one more thing he learned to bear. Recently, after an extraordinarily stressful year, the ringing got worse, waking him at night with headaches, dizziness, pulling him once again from his day-to-day moments into this pain from days gone by.

Nawras leans back in his office chair, dictaphone in hand, and looks up at the corner of the white ceiling, absorbed in thought as he notes the man’s symptoms and recommendations for treatment. His stethoscope is wrapped around his neck, and I remark to myself how he looks just like a doctor. The thought catches me as I think it, and I can’t help but be annoyed with myself. He looks that way because he is almost a doctor, no longer that young boy I first met.

He finishes his dictation, checks his schedule and sees he has one more patient, the last one of the day.

We get up and walk to the examination room. He reaches for the door and pauses for a moment, a beat, nothing more as he adjusts his shirt, and then walks in. The patient is waiting.

This story was reported in September of 2025. Since then, Nawras has graduated and is now a practicing doctor.

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Audio update above.

Original story on Sajal here.

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||Audio version of this story||

Journalism is, in many ways, the repeated act of dropping into other people’s lives. Sometimes the amount of time is only minutes, swooping in to grab some tidbit of information, and in that way it can occasionally feel predatory, like some bird of prey picking off a field mouse. Other times the duration is longer, settling into someone’s life, forming connections that, at times, can even approximate friendship. Always though, I am looking at someone’s life from a distance, and assessing what it means, what it tells me and how it fits into some broader context.

There are times when the friction between being a human and a journalist feels stronger than others. When my role as an extractor and conveyor of information feels paramount. When I feel conflicted. When I leave a room unsure whether I have witnessed a life or somehow consumed it.

So when Mohammed tells me he wants to die, this friction becomes blisteringly clear.

I feel a sweep of questions. I wonder how that fits into the story, how many people are like him. I question how to respond, how to help. I question my role. Is it purely to report it to you, the reader, convey the gravity of these decisions, reveal to you how fraught the act of migrating can be? I question how much weight to give to that.

Because you’ll see in the main story that Mohammed is merely a sideshow, an example, no more. His entire life, the hope that has driven it, the grief that has met it, the full weight of whether he will end it, the hurt and anger and world-ending absence he would leave behind, all compressed into a few short sentences.

And those sentences come from just 50 minutes together. 50 minutes speaking in a humdrum white office, this fleeting moment in our lives as we barrel past each other. 50 minutes in which he tells me of his pain and shows me where it lives, pulling his shirt up to reveal the soft rolls of his belly, grabbing a chunk of his flesh to point to the place where the stress and hate and shame and fear has burrowed into his guts, twisting the smooth rope of his intestines into a hateful knot. 50 minutes in which I pull on the thread of his story, his life: “Tell me about this. What about that? How do you feel about this? What happened here?” 50 minutes in which he cries multiple times, his mind visibly spinning out in front of me. 50 minutes of him telling me that the stress and the shame are too much, that he has fucked it all up, that he just wishes it would end. And throughout it all I sit there, listening, caring, but also, on some very real level, grading his experience. Evaluating it against the story I’m trying to tell you, against the broader context of what I’ve heard, weighing how much time it’s worth.

And Mohammed carries on, speaking of his regret, his worry, he can’t stop himself, this dark matter that has accrued in his belly just billowing out like moths from a closet or blood from a broken tooth. This last gasp he has thinking “maybe you will help. Maybe by stripping myself bare and striking this match here in front of this man, he can do something. Maybe it will mean something.”

And yet I sit there, dumbly, asking questions. And after 50 minutes of doing this and looking into his flat eyes as he tells me about the night terrors he has, I ask to take his picture. I ask to take his picture. I ask this man who is so visibly, palpably undone whether it is okay to take his fucking picture.

And he says yes, because maybe this will help. Because why not when the world is fucked. Because this is what he came here to do and he is still in it, still pushing forward, still committed to the idea that being seen might be worth something. And so I take his picture. And then I move him to where the lighting is better. And yes, take his picture again…and to what end? So that I can feel proud of a pretty picture? So that I can convey the emotional weight of that moment? Who does that serve?

Yes, I want to make sense of it all. And I want to convey the gravity of these decisions. I want to show you that the choice to leave home is fraught and precarious just as it is rewarding and stabilizing. I want to show you that there is risk and that some people come out on the wrong side of it. That not all bets pay off. That lives and families and dreams and futures are the stakes. Not for pity, for there is no cheaper an emotion, but for recognition that men like Mohammed, who do everything right, are still chewed up and that the machinery of it all is real and relentless and brutal and savagely indifferent.

I do this to show you that this man is real, his story worth attention, but in that very doing I risk making him less so.

Because I do this all with someone’s life. And that person is standing in front of me, digging mindlessly at the skin on the tip of his thumb while I look through the photos on my camera and think to myself “oh this one is okay, this one is better, oh this one is shit, maybe I should move him a little to the left. I wonder if the light can dim here somehow…and hmm should I take this one again?”

And while I want this to matter, I also sit with the possibility that this will just be a story people read in The Endless Scroll. That his pain will become content.

And when we are done, we are done. And we talk a little more and then he exits the room, looks around as he walks out into the hallway, and goes back into his life, me into mine, never to collide with each other again. And I stand there in the room exhaling, taking a moment to collect myself and make sense of this crashing encounter, and also to wonder whether I captured what I needed.

And don’t get me wrong, when we sit I feel the weight he is under and I am so terribly sorry. I comfort him. We take breaks. I offer him tissues and something to drink when he is tilted and needs to level out. I check in on whether he wants to continue. And he does. Every time, he does. And so I follow his lead, pushing when he signals me forward, pulling back when he needs it. But let’s also be clear - this does nothing for his life.

And so I think about what I can do. I speak to the NGO that has organized these interviews about his case, and I ask what additional support can be given. I emphasize that he needs serious counseling. That he is careening towards the edge and will not take his foot off the gas unless someone intervenes and something changes. I say these things because I’m worried for him. Because he is dying. Because I feel a very real sadness and pain seeing him as I do.

But I also say these things because I have nothing to give. Because I feel useless and gross. Because this man’s entire world, all of his pain and hurt and self-loathing will be an anecdote, a few punchy words in my story, no more. Because I cannot give him any respite and because I want respite of my own. I ask because I care. But also because I don’t care enough to stop everything and do what I can to help him then and there.

Because the reality is that I have a wad of cash in my bag that would be life-changing. I could sweep away his debt and then some. I could find a therapist in Dhaka, and pay for the help he needs. Maybe I could keep him alive, buy the treatment his sick mother needs to be comfortable in her final days. I could put his daughter back in school, the daughter he pulled out because he could no longer pay, the daughter whose ruined future adds to the shame that consumes him.

But instead I defer that responsibility, shift it to the NGO. It’s not my place after all, that’s not my role. That’s what I tell myself.

I know some of this sounds like self-flagellation. Maybe it is. But I’m writing this because the tension is real, not unique to me, but real. Reporting elements like this can feel like a tightrope, an act of pulling something out of someone while trying not to destabilize. Trying to do right by them and do right by the story. To tell what needs to be told while remembering that the people telling it are real.

When to stop asking questions, when to end the interview, whether to take the photograph…those lines are clearer than they might seem here. We are in that room together, a place he has chosen to be, and I want it to mean something. That means getting as much of the story as I can without doing harm. And that can feel uncomfortable. I accept that even when I don’t particularly like it.

But whether to step in beyond my role as a journalist, whether to provide some kind of material support, when to simply be a human, that’s where it can get murkier. Because there are times when I have, and others when I haven’t. And that has had much less to do with the person’s circumstances than my own. My own headspace, my own capacity, what I had left to give that day, what I had left to do. And that’s the part that unsettles me, frustrates me. Because where I draw the line between helping and not ends up feeling totally personal, subjective. And that feels fucked and ugly, but also inescapable.

And so I take a sip of water. I eat a banana. And I call the next interviewee in.

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The following are portraits of people I met while reporting out Sajal’s story. Some are family. Others are strangers whose lives run parallel to his, each building and betting in their own way.

*To enlarge videos, click on the small box in the bottom right if viewing on desktop or the arrows in top left if viewing on phone.

The first thing you notice as you leave the airport in Dhaka is the people. They are everywhere. Exiting the sliding doors of arrivals you emerge into what feels like a disused parking lot and there, waiting for you behind a cordon enforced by roving airport security guards are hundreds, a mass of bodies, families craning for loved ones, touts scanning and calling for customers, dozens of taxi drivers waving frantically like some group of men marooned at sea.

Speeding down the elevated expressway out of the airport, dusty buildings and mildewed concrete skating past the window, it's easy to forget that scrum of people. But as you peel off the smooth tarmac and descend to street level the full tilt of the city comes into view.

Flatbed trucks stacked high with towers of matte red bricks or hard shelled coconuts, motorscooters weaving between brightly colored rickshaws and spluttering tuktuks, people dangling from the sides as legs pump pedal bikes between the margins, sweat soaking through stained undershirts and patterned lungis. Overhead an entire nervous system of wire and cord tangles between concrete pylons, amassing in black dendritic nests of plastic and metal while underfoot everything is covered in a uniform gray patina of dust and soot and grime and human detritus forever accumulating, settling, sweeping up into the air and settling again and you wonder if that is just the color of things and the way they have always been, or if lines were ever sharper, the contrast deeper than the washed out dullness covering life with this flat weight. The air is sticky, alive, like hot breath connecting you somehow to the gurgling bodies jostling past as the exhaust and bodies and wheels and motion and noise and noise and noise build into a mass swarming and shifting and shaping around you as it honks and chokes and spews and shouts into the grip of meat and metal that “Yes I am here and I need space too because I live here too and I exist I exist let me live please let me live!”

The sheer numbers to Bangladesh’s story are mind numbing. Take more than half of all Americans and put them in the state of Iowa and you’ll start to approximate the scale and intensity. With over 36 million people, Dhaka, the capital, is the world’s second largest city and widely considered the most densely populated. In the city’s informal settlements, which hold millions, six live in a space roughly the size of an American parking space. The city is so dense, that if the entire country, again roughly the size of Iowa, matched its concentration it would be home to more than six and a half billion people.

The infrastructure has buckled under this weight. The average speed of traffic in Dhaka is just under three miles per hour and the city routinely ranks worst in the world for air quality. Nationally, nearly 42 million people, or essentially all of Canada, live in poverty.

To say Bangladesh has a lot of people is so beyond self-evident as to become meaningless, like saying the ocean has a lot of water. Bangladesh is people, its defining feature, its competitive advantage, its main export.

Life for the vast majority here is not something passive to choose from and experience. Life here happens to you, relentlessly. It is a force you try to outrun, feet pounding to keep pace, elbows thrown wide to hold space, to avoid being crushed by the hungry churn of it all.

It is no wonder then that more than a million people leave every year in search of better opportunity, often any opportunity, elsewhere. The scale is now so large that Bangladesh has quietly become one of the world's biggest labor-exporting countries, in the same league as the Philippines, the traditional heavyweight of formal overseas labor migration. It’s a vast outward flow, sustaining millions of families through channels both seen and secret, a lifeline that saves lives just as it exposes the country to some of its deepest vulnerabilities. Of the major destinations - India, the Gulf states, Malaysia, Singapore - Saudi Arabia is the biggest by far with close to three and a half million, accounting for nearly 10% of the gulf country’s population. Sajal Mia hopes to be one of them.

When I meet him, he is sitting on a tipped-over tree trunk beside the fish pond behind his house, the midday heat pooling around us. “Life on the road is full of pain,” he says as he stands, “but the more you encounter hardship, the more money you can make. You can’t make money without suffering in this life.”

His seven-year-old son Abdullah stands as well, shifting closer to him by the edge of the pond. We’re a few minutes walk from his house in Jamtala, a small village outside Kishorganj in northeastern Bangladesh and the sun is hot, reflecting off the silty, tea-colored water of the pond. I continue to sit, giving space as Abdullah quietly says something and Sajal takes hold of his hand.

Sajal has the sort of open, boyishly handsome face that pulls you in. His cheeks and eyes do much of the work, his mouth turning ever so slightly up at the corners as his cheeks bunch upwards, and his dark, kind eyes glint with something alive, something that could be warmth or amusement. He feels immediately unguarded, presenting an openness that comforts. The warmth is real, disarming, but also misdirecting from how observant his eyes actually are, from the sharp intelligence that’s reading the moment. It is only when he really smiles that you realize this, realize you were always on the outside. For when he does smile it is genuine and full, his eyes crinkling in delight just as his whole face opens up, the tip of his tongue peeking out between teeth that are slightly stained from the cigarettes he sneaks behind the house so Abdullah won’t see him, and from the betel nut he occasionally chews. It’s a smile that gives you everything, the confidence, the wear, the small vanities and compromises that make up a life. You see the 34-year-old man who lost his father when he was one and started working to help his mother as soon as he could stand, who worked for thirteen years as an office assistant fetching tea and cleaning dishes, who holds hands with his son nearly everywhere they go and who takes a machete to a green coconut with three clean strikes, no hesitation or wasted motion as the blade bites through the tough husk. When he smiles, you trust him completely just as you realize you’ve been duped.

Sajal is two days away from leaving. Leaving Abdullah, his pregnant wife Mumtaz, his mother, the house he has grown up in, the plot of land that has been home to his family for more than a century.

Joining the more than 60,000 men and women who leave for Saudi Arabia each month, Sajal will work for 10 hours a day, 26 days a month, assembling furniture. His days will be spent hunched over stacks of cheap particle board with a drill in hand, inhaling the fine wooden dust as he tries to keep thoughts of home at bay.

I stand up from the tree trunk and walk up beside Sajal. Beyond the pond are a few small rice paddies, a rare acre or two of land without houses or people or cars. A large road cuts behind the far end of the paddy and we can hear buses and trucks grumbling past as they grind through gears. Two others, young men Sajal has watched grow from birth, sit nearby with simple bamboo fishing rods in hands, drifting in and out of a quiet conversation as they flick their lures into the water and wait. A woman, fully clothed, and her small daughter bathe in another pond behind us. The girl stands, submerged to her small thighs, and stares uncertainly as her mother steps into the deeper water and dips below.

Sajal and Abdullah quietly exchange a few words in Bengali, but I can see Sajal’s focus is broader, soaking in the fields, the pond, this community of his around him.

“Will you miss it?” I ask, raising my chin slightly towards the field beyond.

“Yes. Yes of course,” he says, turning to face me fully, “I will miss so many parts of life here. But to gain something I must lose something.”

He pauses, contemplating whether to speak like this in front of Abdullah, and then continues, “Here, even with the struggle of everyday life, I get to come home to my wife and mother and son. There I won’t get that chance. I will lose all of this. I will lose time and I will never get it back.”

This loss is not unique in his family. Sajal’s father-in-law worked for more than a decade in Dubai, his brother-in-law spent 14 years in Malaysia, he will travel to Riyadh with another brother-in-law, a man named Alamgir, and they will join his cousin who’s been there for three years already. His hope is to bring his nephew over after a few years.

Abdullah becomes restless, the moment fades and we decide to walk back to their home.

As we walk through the village Sajal is stopped by various friends and after every exchange Sajal tells me about their family members abroad, people in Jeddah, Kuwait City, Singapore, Jakarta, the list goes on, all working to send money home, to stash enough to return and begin again, begin better. Nearly every doorway Sajal passes tells its own version of what migration can unlock.

The impact of these jobs on families is transformative. With disposable income coming in, families invest in their homes, installing tin roofs and cement floors, education, farming equipment and high yield agricultural inputs. With enough capital many go on to invest in a small business, building an economic flywheel that can generate revenue long after they have returned. Health outcomes improve as families can afford medical care and better nutrition. Children stay in school longer. The examples are countless in Jamtala. Sajal’s brother-in-law, Jalal, for instance used the money he made in Malaysia to open a small kiosk in the village. His father-in-law invested some of his savings from Dubai into a chicken business he now runs. Those businesses they’ve started now put their children through good schools and have helped sick family members get better. For Sajal, his hope is to make enough over the next six or seven years to buy back two pieces of land he sold to cover the cost of his son’s birth and to start a small clothing shop. Across millions of villages, remittances reshape family life like this, and together they form the quiet financial architecture that Bangladesh increasingly depends on.

In Bangladesh and many lower-income economies, weak financial institutions and high collateral requirements make it nearly impossible for low-income workers to borrow the money for such businesses. The result is tens of millions toiling in cycles where they scrape by each day with just enough, never able to save and build something generative. It’s a dynamic the development sector has long sought to address.

As Dr. Zahid Hussain, the former lead economist for the World Bank in Bangladesh, told me, “for poor people with no collateral, the only option they have is to form a group and get microcredit. Otherwise, there is a void, there is a missing middle as you don’t have access to finance. If you want to become an entrepreneur, you first go abroad, you accumulate savings, you come back, you invest.”

In 2024 the World Bank published a paper showing that while migration costs for Bangladeshis are high, often more than 2.5 times annual household incomes, the total earnings abroad average more than 9 times that initial cost. Nearly 60% of returning migrants surveyed were running their own business, compared with just over 20% for those who never left. With loans for migration costs more accessible because they’re backed by work contracts, migration has effectively become how people get business loans.

“They don’t see any other option of generational mobility,” Dr. Hussain says. “If they stay here, they will just barely make a living, if at all. Even a master’s degree holder might be a rickshaw puller or a bank teller.”

The impact on the country is hard to overstate. Last year, Bangladesh received a record $32.8 billion through official channels alone. “At a macro level, remittances are the strongest pillar of stability,” Dr. Hussain says. “Without question, Bangladesh’s most important export is people.”

These flows dwarf every other source of foreign exchange. While Bangladesh’s garment industry is often celebrated as the engine of the economy, remittances bring far more foreign currency into the country on a net basis. “The garment sector produces $40 billion in exports,” Dr. Hussain explains, “but after accounting for the cost of imported inputs, the net is only around $12 billion.” Remittances on the other hand arrive as cold hard cash.

The scale extends to employment. Bangladesh’s garment factories employ about four million workers, while nearly nine million Bangladeshis work as temporary migrants abroad. And over the past three years, at least half of all new entrants to the labor force have left for work overseas.

That fragility was on full display in July and August 2024, when long-simmering economic frustrations, especially among young people, erupted into nationwide protests that were met with a brutal police crackdown. Over three weeks, as many as 1,400 people were killed and the government collapsed, with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina ultimately fleeing by helicopter.

While the administration may have changed, the forces that will determine its success are the same. The migration pipeline, the remittance lifeline and the foreign reserves they are meant to bolster.

Dr. Fahmida Khatun, a prominent Bangladeshi economist and Executive Director of the Center for Policy Dialogue, was clear when we spoke recently, “This next government’s success will largely depend on how they manage the migration economy and facilitate remittances. They will need to give youth opportunities but also ensure they have foreign reserves to spend.”

Yet even this lifeline is only partially visible. Much of the money these migrants send home moves through informal channels and remains uncounted in figures like last year’s $32.8 billion. In 2022, Bangladesh’s then Finance Minister estimated that nearly half of all remittances - tens of billions of dollars - travel through hundi, South Asia’s version of hawala, a trust-based informal transfer system rooted in medieval trade routes across South Asia and the Middle East, where merchants settled debts across vast distances without physically moving money. “I don’t think it has changed,” says Dr. Khatun when speaking of the percentage of remittances transferred through hundi, “it is still about the same as formal (channels)”.

The explanation is simple. For migrants, hundi isn’t just convenient but often essential. The rates are better, often paying .5 to 1 taka more per dollar than banks. Transfers happen in hours, not days. And it requires no formal documentation. No bank account, no proof of address, no questions asked.

For workers like Sajal earning $400 a month, these differences matter. An extra half-taka per dollar means dozens more meals for his family. The speed means his wife can bulk-buy rice when the price is good. And accessibility means the system works for the millions of Bangladeshis who don’t have bank accounts.

But before any remittance can be sent, formally or informally, a worker must first buy their way out of the country.

“Getting to Saudi Arabia is its own ordeal,” Shariful Hasan, Associate Director at BRAC, Bangladesh’s largest NGO, and head of its Migration Programme, told me from his office in Dhaka, “Bangladesh has the highest migration cost in the world”. While the official government-mandated cost should be a little over $1,300, migrants pay significantly more, often between $3,000 to $8,000. The entire recruitment system runs on bribes and under-the-table payments through layers of middlemen connecting rural villagers to Dhaka-based agencies, who purchase work slots from Saudi employers. The corruption extends to the highest levels with Saudi embassy officials in Dhaka even being arrested for taking millions of dollars in bribes. “The whole recruitment system from Bangladesh to Saudi, it has been corrupted,” Hasan says.

The industry has ballooned to more than 2,700 registered agencies, many sending workers through fraudulent visas, who then arrive to find the promised jobs nonexistent and end up in abusive informal arrangements or rounded up by Saudi police. Over 45,000 were deported in 2024 alone, returning empty-handed with crushing debt.

One was Mohammed Delwar Hossain, who I met in the town of Narsingdi just after his deportation. For months he’d survived in Saudi Arabia on odd jobs with employers who used his desperation as leverage, until finally the police found him. He returned with nearly $4,000 in debt, a sick mother who needed care, and a shame so thick and knotted, a self-loathing and guilt and dread so clenched and electric with panic that he could barely meet my eyes. He thought about suicide daily, he said, the words delivered so flatly they felt like weather, just another mundane, tiresome fact of this new life he found himself in.

For his own part, Sajal’s visa, bribes, and paperwork cost him $3,000 or three years’ worth of his $80 salary. His job comes through another loophole, a three-month contract with a company he’ll never work for, an arrangement the furniture factory has set up so he can arrive and transfer over. He feels good about it, but the exposure is substantial. If something goes wrong in Saudi Arabia, the debt will ruin his family.

For his brother-in-law, Alamgir, the stakes are even higher. He carries the same $3,000 debt for the job plus another $4,500 he’s accrued over five years as his business collapsed. For him, Saudi Arabia is a lifeline to keep from drowning.

Sajal’s money came together slowly, painfully, borrowed from relatives, from two microfinance organizations, from a neighbor who is friends with his mother, a community chipping in what they can to support the hopes of another.

When he finally has the full amount, Sajal travels to the recruitment agency’s office in Dhaka, a cramped third-floor walk-up in a building in Dhaka’s Naya Paltan neighborhood that’s home to thousands of similar operations.

Karim, the recruitment agent who has been handling his case, counts the cash carefully. Twice. Then once more, licking his fingers to keep them moist as they flick through the bills. He separates it into different stacks. One goes into a drawer, his commission and the agency’s fee for pushing paper and their requisite sweeteners here in Dhaka. But the larger pile, nearly half of what Sajal has brought, stays on the desk.

“For Riyadh,” Karim says simply, not looking up as he bands the bills together into chunky bricks.

Sajal knows what this means without Karim spelling it out. Bribes for visa brokers, payments to Saudi middlemen who grease the wheels, money for men whose names he’ll never know who are making calls and pulling strings thousands of miles away. Money that will never show up on any receipt.

After Sajal leaves, Karim sends a series of messages to men in Dhaka and Saudi Arabia, confirming amounts in Riyals, providing names and codes. Within minutes, men in Riyadh will receive their payments, not through any bank transfer that could be traced, but through hundi.

Sajal doesn’t need to understand how this works. He just needs to show up in Dhaka in a few weeks, collect his plane ticket to Riyadh and hope the job is waiting for him like Karim has promised.

The men Karim messages are part of a network that operates across dozens of countries, moving hundreds of millions of dollars daily. At its center are men like Babu (whose name has been changed to protect his identity).

Babu is a three phone kind of man, a neat little black brick of electronics on the table in front of him if not for the fact that he always has one, more often two, in his hands. Babu is a man at odds with time, always trying to squeeze the last bit of juice out of every minute. He starts answering your question before you can even finish asking it, quickly tapping out two or three messages as he speaks, pausing midway through to send a voice message, he then stands and sidles away to take a short call, speaking loudly, unselfconsciously for all to hear. He sits back down and sips from a soup he has taken from the restaurant buffet, still speaking as he spoons the broth down his throat. At no more than five foot three he is a hummingbird of a man, his focus and body always moving, a highly sprung intensity to every movement.

It’s 9pm and we’re seated at a hotel restaurant in Dhaka’s Naya Paltan neighborhood. A small army of waiters in bow ties and black suit vests ping pong between tables draped with white tablecloth, never farther than a few feet, waiting like ballboys on a tennis court to step in and serve more when the food on your plate or the tea in your cup gets low. The restaurant is full, an echoey din that competes with the honking city outside.

Like all cities, Dhaka runs on connections. Access is power, power is money, and money is access. Babu is a man at the center of all three.

“I’m just a businessman,” he says slurping more soup as he talks in a rapid fire stream of consciousness that defies grammar and punctuation and any attempt to keep up, “I move money that’s what I do so I do business with whoever needs to move money families businessmen migrants poor rich young old whoever”

He holds up a phone to me mid-sentence, showing a WeChat message with someone in Guangzhou, then flicks over to another chat with someone in Riyadh, “These are people I’m helping right now,” he smiles. A businessman in trouble. A migrant worker sending money home.

In Bangladesh it is nearly impossible to send money abroad. Citizens can send up to $12,000 a year outside the country with the exception of medical or educational expenses. These exceptions, however, come with endless bureaucracy and strict caps that are rarely high enough for many to meet their needs, and so hundi becomes the only solution to cover a brother’s cancer treatment in Istanbul or a daughter’s university fees in Boston. For businessmen, politicians and the well-heeled looking to stash funds abroad, hundi is the only option. And so while people like Babu may be considered just a businessman in other countries, in Bangladesh he is a power broker.

Six other men suddenly appear at our table and sit down around us. I have no idea who they are, where they have come from, or how they are related to Babu but to stop and ask would be to change the mood, as if demonstrating the laws of quantum mechanics and change the very nature of this friendly get together simply by observing it.

Babu flits between conversations with some of the various men and I take a sip of my coffee, wincing at the instant coffee’s bitterness. I turn to my fixer, Shehab and remark on the coffee while giving a quick raise of my eyebrows at our new guests. He smiles, gives a subtle nod that we’re good and gestures for me to pour some coffee in his cup.

“Sending money abroad is a constant here,” Babu says in an unbroken stream as he turns back from his men to me, “That demand doesn’t change you see whether you’re a politician or a regular person everybody needs to send money abroad so it’s very simple do you get it I have a network of people you know my associates outside the country and we move money without needing to actually move any money.”

The mechanics are indeed surprisingly simple. Say a Bangladeshi worker in Riyadh needs to send money home. He hands Saudi Riyals to one of Babu’s contacts there. Babu gets a message with the amount and the recipient’s name in Bangladesh. Within hours, sometimes minutes, one of Babu’s foot soldiers here, a man running a kiosk or money exchange shop in the recipient’s village, hands over the equivalent in Taka. Increasingly frequently this last mile moves via mobile money transfers.

“We always give a little more than the bank,” he says as he flicks between messages on his phone, “If the bank is giving 125 taka a dollar we’ll give 125.5 so the spread isn’t much but if you’re poor it matters and the rich do it because they have to and if you have an emergency you need it now and this is the way to get money now like right n...”

He looks down at his phone mid-sentence and answers, standing up as he listens and gestures with a tilt of his head towards the door, that he’ll be back, and walks out.

What makes the system work is trust and reach. Babu isn’t working alone, he’s part of a web of independent, overlapping networks. In Bangladesh alone there are dozens of separate operations, each with their own operators managing their own contacts and foot soldiers across the country.

These foot soldiers are the system’s foundation. Men running kiosks, fruit stalls, or money exchange businesses in villages and towns, collecting cash and doling it out, maintaining the personal relationships that make the whole thing work.

When they need to move money beyond their own contacts, they tap into larger operators in places like Singapore and Dubai, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, the clearing houses where accounts get settled across continents. A network in Dhaka might use a central hub in Dubai to balance its books, and another in Singapore for another large transaction.

These people abroad aren’t bosses dictating terms, just bigger operations with more contacts, more volume. It’s less a pyramid than a nervous system. Independent networks interlinked through nodes, each operator connected to others through mutual dependence and a shared agreement that trust is the currency and a word is bond, just as we all agree that a dollar is worth a Snickers bar.

Waiters circle. Nearby a large table of men in suits and tailored panjabis talk loudly, occasionally rising into shouts. A man sits confidently at the head, legs splayed wide to cradle his belly as it overflows onto his thighs. His eyes bulge from his face as he occasionally barks orders, his jowls and neck, mottled from a diabetically rich life, tremble with each command. He is clearly someone and I turn to Shehab who tells me he’s a longtime MP with the Bangladesh National Party - one of the country’s main political parties.

The restaurant, a few minutes from Babu’s office and his regular spot, is also next door to a BNP party headquarters, and like real life the distance between politics and money, access and power is non-existent here.

Babu walks in, looking at two phones now, and begins where he left off. “You got everything? Say a Bangladeshi guy needs an operation in Singapore his family gives my people here money and I tell my people in Singapore to give him that amount in Singaporean Dollars and it’s done in minutes or 12 hours max for really big amounts.”

On any given day, Babu will send anywhere from $150,000 to more than $500,000 criss-crossing borders.

The hundi network that operators like Babu run serves two opposing clients, in turn creating one of the more striking contradictions in Bangladesh’s economy. On one hand it’s a financial lifeline for millions of families like Sajal’s who are simply trying to eke out a better life. On the other it’s the primary mechanism that enables capital flight and drains the country of foreign currency.

When Sajal hands Saudi Riyals to a hundi operator in Riyadh, his family receives Taka in Jamtala within hours. But that foreign currency he and millions of others have earned - the Dollars and Riyals, Dinars and Euros that should be flowing into Bangladesh’s banking system, building up the country’s foreign exchange reserves - never arrives. Instead, it stays offshore, sitting in operators’ foreign accounts within networks like Babu’s that stretch to Singapore and Dubai. Those accounts become a vast, unofficial reservoir of foreign currency, disconnected from any central bank, government oversight or national ledger.

That reservoir is exactly what Bangladesh’s elite need.

When a corrupt official in Dhaka wants to buy a new condo in Dubai, or a businessman needs to stash undeclared cash in a Singaporean bank they can’t use banks, for those transactions leave trails. So they visit a man like Babu with a suitcase full of Taka, who takes the cash with a smile and makes a call. His counterpart abroad, the same person who just received Sajal’s Riyals from Babu’s network in Riyadh, uses that same foreign currency to secure the Dubai condo, the Singapore bank transfer.

Sajal’s family gets their Taka. The corrupt officials get their foreign assets. But the foreign currency that Sajal earned is captured mid-flight, redirected to serve the capital flight of the ultra wealthy and corrupt.

The scale is staggering with a recent government white paper estimating that as much as $234 billion was siphoned out of Bangladesh, primarily via hundi, during the previous regime's 15 year rule, a finding later featured in a Financial Times documentary.

The sacrifice of workers like Sajal, the blood and tears he’ll spill into his work, the years of distance that will grow between him and Abdullah, the debt he’ll spend years repaying, the birth of his second child that will happen thousands of miles away, all of it creates the infrastructure, the very pot of cash, that allows those running Bangladesh’s grueling factories and raiding the country’s coffers to move their billions abroad.

This isn’t some abstract loss, but rather shows up directly in the state’s ledgers. “We were losing foreign exchange reserves of $1 billion a month after fiscal year ‘21,” Dr. Hussain explains, “We had $48 billion of reserves at that time, and in two years that declined by more than $24 billion. Bangladesh’s Bank had to support the demand in the market, and there was no other source.”

Surging post-COVID import prices drove this drain, but it was so dire because the remittances that should have been replenishing the reserves were being captured by hundi, never reaching the banking system. In effect, by trying to live off its migrants, Bangladesh has, through neglect and design, created conditions where those same migrants are forced into a shadow system that guts the nation from within.

The government understands this and has recently begun offering incentives such as a 2.5% bonus for using formal banking channels, issuing public statements about crackdowns, and even running a face-saving raid or two. But they’re trapped in an impossible bind. A genuine crackdown would not only make enemies out of the rich and powerful who rely on hundi to stash their wealth, but also cut off the financial lifeline for millions of rural families who depend on the system’s speed and accessibility, triggering household-level crises across the countryside and potentially sparking the kind of unrest that brought down the previous government. So they tinker at the edges, hoping to lure transactions into formal channels without destroying the informal ones. Meanwhile the bleeding continues.

Dawn has just broken as Sajal and Alamgir get into the car. They arrived in Dhaka the day before and are on their way to the airport. The city is slowly waking and we weave through a light flow of rickshaws and men pulling wooden carts stacked high with the rubbish they’ve collected overnight.

Sajal and Alamgir are chatty in the backseat, their nerves and excitement palpable as they wonder aloud about navigating the airport, how it will feel to fly, and whether they will get sick. I explain check-in and security and reassure them that there is a bathroom on the plane, the two of them laughing in the backseat as they question the mechanics of a sit-down toilet instead of the squat toilets they’re used to.

We merge onto the expressway and pick up speed, our chatter and excitement quieting as the car settles into a steady hum.

A few minutes pass as we each recede into thought.

Looking behind me, I see Sajal staring out the window and I can’t help but ask what he’s thinking.

“I’m thinking about all of this,” he says, sweeping his hand across the life speeding past outside, “these are the last hours I have here for a long time. I’m excited. I’ve waited for this moment for so long, but also,” he pauses, choosing his words carefully, “it’s not easy, and in order to survive I know I will need to close this off and focus on work.”

The weight of this duality has been present in every moment of the last few days. It was present in the way his mother cried when he singed his hand making coffee, praying over his palm, tears streaming down her face for the son she worried about, the child she longed to protect. It was present in the way Sajal took off his shoes and walked barefoot through his village - something he has not done in many years - on his last day at home, needing to touch the soil his family has worked for generations one last time. Present in the containers of home-cooked food his wife has packed in his luggage, hungry to feed and nourish him long after goodbye. All these acts neither exist without love nor the fear of never being able to give that love again.

There is so much to lose when you leave a life - your family, your friends - the people who are the mirror to see and understand yourself, but also the characters and context to your memories and the prospect of making new ones together. And in that way your past feels more distant and your future becomes irrevocably your own, separate, as you move off on a different trajectory to the life you have lived. Sajal will watch from afar as Abdullah grows long and lanky into a teenager, dark wispy hairs spreading across his upper lip, unable to help him shave for the first time. He will watch from the outside as his mother gets frail or sick, and friends and family die, their place in the world forever vacant. From his cramped bunkbed in Riyadh, surrounded by dozens of other men, he will peer through his phone, like some periscope to another world, and watch as his coming daughter is born, turns one, takes her first steps, and begins to speak, his life forever bifurcated, the tears in what’s shared forever present as time does not reverse and we are never able to undo what has been done. He will watch as his wife’s daily rhythms, these tangible knowns that at first put him at ease as he listens to her recount the rising cost of rice or the latest gossip about their drunken neighbor, then gradually, over weeks, months, years, feel less tangible, less relatable, less relevant to his life. A subtle declination at work, he will increasingly see them from a distance, unable to touch them and feel their weight. They will no longer be his, just as the stories of his snoring bunkmate or the dry, blistering heat of the Saudi sun will remain foreign to his wife. And in these ways they will begin to understand that somewhere along the way they each began to live their own lives and that not only will no amount of WhatsApp messages or video calls solder them together, but those calls and the silence that follows will themselves become the lens through which they are able to see how far they have drifted. This is no statement on their relationship nor any other, but simply a statement on the fact that life does not stand still.

And yet out of this Sajal will be able to send Abdullah to a better school, he will cover the cost of his daughter’s birth without taking on new debt, he will provide enough for the family so that his mother can occasionally buy the type of kalo jamun she likes with the toasted coconut, so that he can build the future he wants to return to. There is a reason for it all and in that there is respite and thankfulness and even some type of happiness.

Our car pulls off the expressway as we exit to the airport and we wind our way up the ramp to the departures terminal. The sun is already hot as we get out of the car, but it feels like it will rain. A cyclone has formed off the coast and the air feels thicker now, heavier.

Sajal and Alamgir grab their bags from the trunk and look around at the mass of young men and women all pulling their own suitcases forward, the throngs of teary-eyed families saying goodbye, the wails of a mother, the coughs of a father as he tries to choke down the swelling sadness that shudders his chest.

Hundreds of young men and women, who like them, will propel themselves across the Arabian Sea, all out to stake their claim in the hopes of building something better.

Sajal and Alamgir wheel their bags forward and enter the fray, no longer just two men leaving but entering this much larger procession, millions of migrants whose departures, repeated day after day, have become the country’s central economic rhythm. Their sacrifices feeding entire villages, financing education, anchoring households. Their debts plunging others into years of pain that many never fully escape. Their earnings traveling home in separate streams, one formal, visible, stabilizing the country and the other opaque and secret. A system that simultaneously strengthens the country as it hollows it out.

Sajal and Alamgir present their passports to a security officer and walk through the entrance, instantly becoming silhouettes as they step out of the morning’s bright light and into the building’s shadow. Their flight is at 1:45pm and it’s not even 7:30am.

Behind them, the city continues to churn, all bodies and noise, movement and need, surviving on their sacrifice, feeding on their absence.

This story would not have been possible without the work of Dhaka-based journalist and fixer Shehab Sumon, as well as the support from Saif Hasnat and Mohammed Ali Mazed.