- Mar 20
- 8 min read
The Middle East War shows the powerlessness of migrant workers in the Gulf
The vulnerability of migrant workers in the current war is not the product of bad luck. It is the predictable outcome of a system that was built to maintain maximum flexibility for employers and minimum security for workers
By The Immigrant Times
Tens of millions of Asian migrants, who are essential to the Gulf states’ economies, work in a system that makes them vulnerable to exploitation. The Middle East War shows how powerless they really are.
March 2026: When bombs, missiles and drones struck targets across the Middle East, governments in Europe and North America moved quickly to repatriate their nationals. Charter flights were organised. Emergency consular services were activated. Within days, the first evacuation aircraft had returned diplomats, tourists and expatriate professionals to safety.
For the tens of millions of migrant workers from the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia who keep the Gulf’s cities running, there were no such arrangements. They had built the towers, staffed the hospitals, cleaned the hotels and cared for the children of some of the world’s wealthiest societies. When war came, most found themselves without options: unable to leave, uncertain whether they would be paid, and largely invisible to the governments of the countries that had grown rich from their labour.
The contrast between the treatment of Western expatriates and that of low-wage Asian migrant workers is not incidental. It reflects a system, legal, economic and political, that was designed to extract the maximum value from the most vulnerable workers at the lowest possible cost.
Wealth built on cheap labour
The scale of the Gulf’s dependence on foreign workers is extraordinary. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), migrant workers make up between 76 and 95 per cent of the workforce across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, which include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In Qatar and the UAE, foreign nationals account for roughly 88 per cent of the entire population. Non-citizens make up at least 95 per cent of the private-sector workforce in Qatar and Kuwait.
The ILO estimates more than 24 million migrant workers in the Gulf region alone. The majority are men employed in construction, engineering, logistics and the energy sector. Women, predominantly from the Philippines, Indonesia and Bangladesh, work mainly as domestic helpers: cooks, cleaners, child-minders and carers, often living in the household of their employer.
The principal sending countries are India, with more than ten million workers in the Gulf, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia. The financial flows are substantial. India received an estimated US$137 billion in remittances in 2024, making it the world’s largest recipient. Filipino overseas workers sent a record US$35.63 billion in 2025, equivalent to 7.3 per cent of the country’s GDP. Pakistani workers in the Middle East send home roughly ten per cent of Pakistan’s GDP. For Nepal, remittances account for more than a quarter of the national income.
These transfers are not supplementary income. They are the financial foundation on which millions of families, and some national economies, depend. A worker forced to return home early or who stops being paid does not merely lose a job. In many cases, they return to debts incurred to fund their recruitment, with no means of repaying them.
The jobs themselves are what the region calls ‘3D’ work, dirty, dangerous and difficult. Construction in extreme heat. Domestic labour with no fixed hours. Sanitation. Seafaring. Gulf citizens do not take these jobs. The expectation that such work will always be performed by imported labour, at wages local workers would not accept, is structural.
The pay reflects the power imbalance. In Qatar, the only GCC state to have introduced a non-discriminatory minimum wage, the floor stands at QAR 1,000 per month, roughly US$275, a level unchanged since 2021. With mandatory employer supplements for food and accommodation, the total rises to QAR 1,800, or around US$495 per month.
The average net monthly salary in Qatar is approximately US$3,275, more than six times the minimum. Western expatriates in professional roles typically earn considerably more, with packages that include housing allowances, school fees and relocation costs.
The Kafala system
The legal framework governing migrant labour in the Gulf is the kafala (sponsorship) system. Under kafala, a worker’s right to reside and work in a GCC country is tied directly to a specific employer, the kafeel. The employer controls the worker’s visa, residency permit and, in most variants of the system, their ability to change jobs or leave the country.
In practice, this gives employers significant power over workers’ lives. A worker who seeks to leave an abusive or non-paying employer risks losing their residency status and becoming undocumented, technically in breach of immigration law and vulnerable to deportation. Deportation means forfeiting outstanding wages and, for many workers, defaulting on recruitment debts equivalent to a year’s earnings.
Documented abuses under the system include passport confiscation, wage theft, excessive working hours, substandard accommodation and restricted movement. Human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have reported such cases consistently across the region.
Some reform has occurred. Saudi Arabia announced the abolition of kafala in June 2025, implementing changes in October as part of its Vision 2030 programme. Qatar has also claimed to have ended the system. Human rights groups, however, note that the core dependency on employer sponsorship remains intact across much of the region, and that enforcement gaps are wide. Kuwait moved in the opposite direction in July 2025, introducing a new exit permit requiring workers to obtain their employer’s permission before leaving the country, even briefly.
The Middle East War hits the poorest hardest
The war between the US/Israel and Iran has exposed and deepened the vulnerabilities that kafala creates. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Iraq and Jordan have all been struck by missiles or drones, countries hosting large migrant worker populations that had not previously been direct targets of regional conflicts.
The International Organisation for Migration reported in early March 2026 that the war had resulted in the deaths and injuries of migrant workers from the Philippines, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, killed or wounded in strikes on civilian areas and critical infrastructure. But there is no record of the full number of migrant casualties.
For many more workers, conditions have deteriorated sharply even without direct physical harm. Thousands are confined to their accommodations, unable to reach their workplaces, and with restricted access to food, medical care, and information. Commercial aviation across the region has been severely disrupted, with numerous airports closed or operating at reduced capacity. For workers who wish to leave, this is not simply an inconvenience: in many cases, it makes departure physically impossible.
The decision facing individual workers is difficult. Staying means remaining in a conflict zone with uncertain income. Leaving means abandoning a contract, forfeiting outstanding wages, and returning home to debts incurred to fund the work in the first place. For workers who are the sole source of income for their families back home, a common situation, the consequences of either choice are serious. Families that have structured their finances around a monthly remittance have little cushion when those transfers stop.
Too many employers neglect their duty of care
Employers' conduct in a crisis is directly shaped by kafala. The system gives employers the legal instruments, visa sponsorship, work permits, residency status, and the ability to cancel or withhold them with relative ease. A worker whose employer stops paying wages or terminates a contract mid-crisis has limited recourse. Labour courts exist in most Gulf states but are slow, conducted in Arabic, and not easily accessible to a worker who may be undocumented by the time they seek help.
The Business and Human Rights Centre in London has documented cases from previous Middle Eastern conflicts in which migrant workers were abandoned by employers without wages or travel documents, the latter making it impossible to seek consular assistance or board a flight. There is no evidence that the current conflict has produced a fundamentally different pattern of employer behaviour.
Some employers have responded responsibly, continuing to pay wages during work stoppages, providing food and shelter, and assisting workers who wish to return home by helping them obtain their documents and outstanding pay intact. Such conduct is, however, the exception rather than the norm.
The position of domestic workers is particularly precarious. Women employed in private households live in their employer’s home. When a crisis strikes, they have no independent means of leaving, reaching an embassy or accessing assistance. In many cases, their passports are held by the household. Their ability to seek help depends entirely on the employer's goodwill.
Gulf governments show little interest in the well-being of migrant workers
The responses of governments have varied considerably and reflect the asymmetry of power that runs through the entire system.
Among sending countries, the Philippines has the most developed infrastructure for supporting its overseas workers. The Philippine Overseas Workers Welfare Administration has a history of managing evacuations from conflict zones and was activated early in the current crisis. Migrant Workers Secretary Hans Leo Cacdac announced in the early days of the conflict that emergency plans were in place.
India established a special operations room to track the whereabouts of more than nine million Indian nationals across Gulf countries. Indonesia and Pakistan announced monitoring operations, though their capacity for rapid large-scale evacuation is more limited.
These efforts face practical constraints. The disruption of commercial aviation removes the most practical tool available for mass repatriation. The scale of the populations involved, tens of millions of workers across multiple countries, is beyond what any sending country’s overseas missions can manage alone.
The record of Gulf host governments is more difficult to assess but deserves scrutiny. These states have built their economies on migrant labour, benefited substantially from it, and created the legal framework under which workers are most exposed in a crisis. There is little evidence of systematic efforts by Gulf governments to ensure that migrant workers in conflict-affected areas have access to food, shelter, medical care or transport during the current emergency.
Fazit
The vulnerability of migrant workers in the current war is not the product of bad luck. It is the predictable outcome of a system that was built to maintain maximum flexibility for employers and minimum security for workers. The kafala framework does not merely leave workers exposed in a crisis: it provides the precise legal mechanism by which a worker can be rendered undocumented, unable to leave and stripped of outstanding wages in a matter of days.
The billions of dollars in annual remittances flowing from Gulf earnings to families across South and Southeast Asia are sometimes taken as evidence that the system functions. They are also the measure of what is extracted from workers operating under conditions, legal, physical, and financial, that the citizens of the receiving countries would not tolerate.
Joanna Concepcion, head of Migrante-International, the Manila-based organisation supporting Overseas Filipino Workers in more than twenty countries, stated in the context of the current conflict: “Many foreign governments exploit Filipino labour and treat them essentially as disposable. Anytime that the contract ends or the workers speak up for their rights, they’re immediately terminated and just treated as criminals and slaves.”
The word ‘disposable’ is precise. The kafala system makes disposal straightforward. What the current crisis has shown is that this disposability, managed and unremarkable in peacetime, becomes a matter of life, debt and destitution when war arrives.
Methodology: The article draws on information from the International Labour Organisation, the International Organisation for Migration, the Business and Human Rights Centre, the Mixed Migration Centre, NPR, Asia Sentinel, Alhurra, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Walk Free Foundation.
Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Pakistani emigrants settle in Europe and the US, but not in the Gulf || Young Nepalis support their country and families by working abroad ||
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