Migration as Escape From Everyday Incivility: Evidence From Bangladesh

This article examines how recurrent everyday incivility entered the migration deliberations of Bangladeshi international migrants and active migration aspirants. Drawing on 32 in‐depth interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024, it develops a qualitative account informed by constructivist grounded theory, recognition theory, and the aspirations‐capabilities approach. Participants connected repeated dismissal, public belittlement, and status‐based disrespect across workplaces, services, and public institutions to unequal recognition and ineffective remedy. For some, these interpretations contributed to emotional depletion, institutional distrust, and weakened belonging, making migration appear to offer a possible route toward dignity. The contribution is to specify a conditional process through which interactional mistreatment becomes meaningful within migration projects already shaped by employment, education, family, political conditions, and mobility resources. Incivility is distinguished from sexual harassment, corruption, coercion, and violence, although these harms may coexist in participants' accounts. The purposive sample neither establishes national prevalence nor isolates an independent causal effect. Migration as escape denotes participants' evaluation of leaving, rather than evidence that destinations necessarily provide recognition or security. The analysis connects the moral quality of everyday institutional encounters to the unequal capacity to pursue exit.