RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The recent FIFA World Cup 2022 scandal has cast a spotlight on manipulative and abusive migrant labor in the small Middle Eastern host country of Qatar. Yet migrant labor is not just contained to this nation; it also persists across the Arabian Peninsula.
Two significant employers of foreign migrants in the region include Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The former has in excess of nine million foreign laborers, which represents the largest amount of migrant laborers among Middle Eastern countries. The UAE tails behind in second place with foreign workers accounting for 75% of its population.
Saudi Arabia in particular has come under fire from human rights organizations recently for unprecedented deportations of its undocumented foreign workers. From November 2014 to March 2015, the nation deported around 2,000 people per day, in total around 300,000.
The Saudi government started this process in late 2013 after giving law enforcement and immigration officials the power to detain and deport any undocumented laborers. Only months after its inception, it had deported close to 430,000 undocumented migrants.
Racism and prejudice have plagued this deportation campaign, with certain ethnic groups or nationalities targeted. Ethiopians in particular have received harsh condemnation from both Saudis and fellow migrant workers, often through outlets such as social media. When the operation first began in 2013, altercations between police and detainees allegedly resulted in the deaths of three Ethiopians.
Violence such as this is not unheard of among those detained and deported. A Human Rights Watch report entitled “Detained, Beaten, Deported: Saudi Abuses against Migrants during Mass Expulsions” detailed the physical abuse and detrimental conditions of 60 migrant laborers who faced deportation. One migrant who was imprisoned in Jeddah in 2013 reported that he and other inmates were forced to fight among one another for food. Without any form of medical assistance, they sometimes received whippings from their captors.
Sadly, for many, brutal conditions permeated their daily lives even before they were forced to leave. Under a system called kafala, foreigners secure a working visa through the sponsorship of an employer and benefactor. In exchange, the foreigner provides their passport and contracts their labor to their sponsor.
As a result, many migrant workers live at the mercy of their employer and often experience physical and sexual abuse, according to the University of Denver’s topical research digest. Those unwilling to tolerate their work will face deportation and must pay the travel expenses home. Essentially, there exists a system of contracted slavery.
And frighteningly, it at times bears a remarkably similar to America’s own former system. According to the University of Denver’s Human Rights and Human Welfare Journal, “Reminiscent of the fugitive slave laws in the United States, Saudi newspapers run bounty ads for ‘escaped’ domestic workers.”
While this has only recently become an issue for Saudi Arabia, its exploitative use of foreign labor is nothing new. It coincided with the increasing oil profits of the 1970s as the need developed for more labor to accommodate the country’s expansion.
But since then, things have gotten out of hand. Of the two million new jobs produced in 2012, 75% went to foreign nationals. In total, they account for half of Saudi Arabia’s workforce.
By deporting its undocumented laborers, Saudi Arabia is attempting to erase a 40-year problem. The Middle East and North Africa Director of the Human Rights Watch, Sarah Leah Whitson, summarized the scope of the issue and its solutions, “In seeking to enforce its labor laws, Saudi Arabia needs to be aware that these same laws sometimes encourage abuses that lead workers to become undocumented, Saudi Arabia will never solve the problem of informal work until it fixes its labor system to root out long-term systemic abuses.”
Sources: Human Rights Watch 1, Human Rights Watch 2, The Guardian, The University of Denver, Reuters
Photo: The Star