Shana Cohen

The treatment of migrant domestic workers is one of the defining stories told about the Arab Gulf states. Every year hundreds of news media and human rights reports detailing migrant domestic workers’ experiences of exploitation and abuse circulate globally. The narratives of these accounts are remarkably consistent. They often begin with the story of an impoverished woman from the global South, who, in order to improve the situation of her family, migrates to the oil-rich Gulf states in search of work and a more prosperous future.

Studies of Gulf women migrants focus on the most noticeable or “problematic” categories — domestic workers and the sex trade — and are generally policy-driven short surveys, using data collected in the Gulf itself.

Over the past three decades there has been much discussion about the impact of labor migration to the Gulf on the countries of origin. However, much less understood is the impact of this labor migration on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and their citizens. There has been documentation that the patterns of migration have changed from Arab migrants to Southeast Asians.

Over the past decade, most of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) experienced robust economic growth. The main force behind this growth is a strong labor force, composed mainly of expatriates. Largely due to its geographical proximity, the Gulf has been a preferred destination for workers from South Asia for years. More recently, however, the GCC has attracted foreign labor from all over the world.

The money that migrants send home is important not only to their families but also to their country’s balance of payments. In many developing countries, remittances represent a significant proportion of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as well as foreign exchange earning.

Several scholars of citizenship and migration in the oil-rich Gulf Arab states have noted the divisions between citizens and non-citizens in terms of mobility, access, geographic location, job prospects, and rights (or lack thereof) in these countries.^[1]These “rentier” states, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which rely on oil for the majority of their income, highly police the boundaries of citizenshi

It is not hyperbole to say that Emirati nationals (al-muwatinin) are vastly outnumbered by foreigners in their country at a ratio higher than almost anywhere else on earth. And, while a growing ethnographic literature documents late 20th century trends among South Asian migrant workers in the Gulf states, few have examined the less populous though highly visible and influential Westerners who work and live there. They deserve our attention.

This essay examines migration from the Iranian coastal region of the Persian Gulf to the nearby Arab countries. At the center of this research are questions of cross-border relationships, the construction of transnational spaces in border migration, and strategies for maintaining networks in both the home and host countries.

Over the past decade, migration to the wealthy states of the Arabian Peninsula has emerged as an increasingly central facet of scholarly attention to the region. This attention has resulted in the exponential expansion of our collective knowledge, and the near future promises even more nuanced and microcosmic analyses as recent and current fieldwork in the region bears fruit. Nevertheless, there has been little discussion of the “labor camps” in which many of the unskilled migrants dwell during their sojourn in the Gulf states.

Formal and informal practices of immigration and employment in the Gulf render inappropriate the classic image of an individual immigrant arriving to set stake and soon send for family. The majority of the foreigners in Bahrain reside there without family and until the 1980s were overwhelmingly male. Nonetheless, over the past century, the unique histories and circumstances of the various nationalities resident in Bahrain have led to the emergence and entrenchment of communities of foreigners.

The six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)^[1]have over five million migrant workers — one of the highest concentrations of migrant workers in the world. According to the World Migration Report (2003), 25% of the workers in Saudi Arabia, 65% in Kuwait, 67% in the UAE, and as much as 70% in Qatar are immigrants or non-nationals.

From fewer than 258,000 in 1975, the migrant Indian population in the Gulf rose to 3.318 million in 2001 and is now estimated at over four million. Indian migrant workers in the GCC countries belong to all three categories of labor: 1) professionals (e.g., doctors, nurses, engineers, architects, accountants, and managers), 2) semi-skilled workers (e.g., craftsmen, drivers, artisans, and other technical workers), and 3) unskilled laborers in construction sites, farmlands, livestock ranches, shops and stores, and households.

After four decades of successive waves of labor migration to the GCC states, three fundamental questions are still subject to debate: In what way can we better comprehend the role and functions in the Arab Gulf societies of this unique phenomenon? How should we assess the labor migrations policies adopted by the countries of this region? What are the possible outcomes of the current trends of this process?

Originally posted December 2009

In his book From My Memories, Khaled Sediq recounts the following incident from the mid-1960s regarding a visit by him and some other members of his family to Mohammad Zahir, King of Afghanistan from 1933 to 1973:

Finally, after uttering some conventional statements, such as, Afghanistan belongs to you and you belong to Afghanistan, he also added: ‘Even though unpleasant events have happened, yet, I have forgotten about them, you, too, try to forget.’[1]

Consider the following fact pattern regularly encountered by Iraqi immigration officers: a poor South Asian farmer submits an application for a temporary guest worker visa that would allow him to take a housekeeping position on an American military base. The Iraqi immigration officer is concerned about two potential difficulties with the application. First, the prospective migrant may overstay his visa. Second, the applicant may impose welfare costs on the state.