There are many ways for a migrant worker to become trapped in a forced-labor situation, in which a worker has no recourse if work conditions are poor or he or she is not being paid. But the problem typically begins at recruitment, the kickoff to a cycle of debt and bondage that can trap people for years and decades. The Verité study found that 92 percent of foreign workers paid recruitment fees to get their jobs, often exceeding what’s standard in the industry (one month’s wages). The money often goes to both a recruiter in Malaysia and in the worker’s home country. These fees are due well before the worker leaves his or her home country, and often plunge an entire family into debt.

This was the case for Novita Marbun, a worker from Medan, Indonesia, whom I spoke with. When Marbun originally came to Malaysia at the age of 19, she paid 1,500 ringgit—the equivalent of about $375 —to get her job, much more than she makes in a month. Her parents took out a 15-year loan on their house to help pay the fee and other costs of her trip. The money she makes now only covers daily expenses and feeding her son, who is still in Indonesia, but she cannot get enough hours to make enough to help her parents. “I can’t save more money,” she said. As MacDonald puts it, “The system is designed to make the most poor pay the costs of recruitment.”

Workers coming from rural regions around Asia can amass large amounts of debt just in an effort to get to a big city where they can get recruited. Anne Beatrice, of the North South Initiative (NSI), an organization based in Kuala Lumpur that supports workers both in their home countries and when they come to Malaysia, told me that by the time a Nepali worker reaches the capital city of Kathmandu, she typically has already procured a sub-agent in her home village, sometimes at great expense to her family. When she reaches the city, she has already invested so much it can feel like it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t like the look of the recruiter or the contract, or the recruiter substitutes the contract before she gets on the plane. “Recruiters have sub-sub-sub-recruiters and sub-sub-sub-agents,” said Sumitha Shaanthinni, a lawyer who works with migrants. “The recruiter doesn’t go to the village; the sub-agent goes to the village.”

Once she arrives in Malaysia the charges continue to accrue. Workers can find themselves paying for a levy for a work permit (a cost which now the law has shifted to the employer, at least in theory), as well as fees for housing and their visa. Although it is against the law, many employers also confiscate and hold workers’ passports in order to keep them from leaving an untenable situation. (Recruiters have their own costs to cover—often some that are less above-board than others. Maliamauv, of Tenaganita, describes a situation in which government officials provide recruiters with more work permits than there are jobs available. How a recruiter “got that bid, those jobs on paper, you need to guess. Paid a bribe.”)