“4. The Gulf Migration System” in “The Fragmentary City”
4 THE GULF MIGRATION SYSTEM
This chapter conveys the primary waypoints, the principal components, the key relations, and the significant stakeholders that altogether comprise the Gulf migration system. I use the concept of a migration system to describe this complicated transnational conglomeration of actors and institutions. The concept allows us to remain cognizant of the fact that as a complicated, multifaceted, and historically variable whole, one migration system—such as the Gulf migration system—can (and does) differ significantly from other migration systems extant in the world. For example, the features, actors, institutions, and history of the Gulf migration system are recognizably different from the same conglomeration of components found in the American migration system, and both differ from the migration system that shuttles migrants to Europe today.
The Gulf migration system can be envisioned as encompassing six destination states in the transnational movement of a massive labor force. Since 1981, those six states have formed the GCC.1 Proceeding north to south along the western shores of the Persian Gulf, the GCC includes Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. The features, qualities, and patterns described here as characteristic of the Gulf migration system generally apply to all six of these states. Together, this region has been described as the third most significant destination for transnational migrants in the contemporary world, after North America and Europe, and the most significant migratory conduit with both the sending and receiving states located in the Global South (ECSWA 2007; Naufal 2011; Rahman 2020). Although the six GCC states include less than 1 percent of our globe’s total population, nearly a quarter (23 percent) of all outbound remittances are sourced from the Gulf states, for a total of US$98 billion in 2014 (De Bel-Air 2018, 7).
Beginning in about 2010, the figure of twenty-five million has been a convenient estimate for the total number of foreigners at work in these six states. Unlike the migrations to North American and European destination states, however, almost none of these twenty-five million foreigners hope to naturalize as citizens in the GCC, nor do most migrants aspire to remain on the Arabian Peninsula in old age. There are, of course, some exceptions to this generalization in the middle and upper classes of foreign workers who reside in the region, and there is a growing body of work concerned with migrant children raised in diaspora.2 Nonetheless, few of the foreigners at work on the Arabian Peninsula desire either naturalization or, more broadly, social integration. Both possibilities are also actively prohibited by the policies put in place by the GCC host states. As a result, the tens of millions of migrants at work in Arabia are best conceived as temporary workers, for the most part. While they may spend the better part of their working lives in one or more of the GCC states, their gaze typically remains fixed on the home they left behind or, for more privileged migrants, on other migratory endpoints beyond Arabia.3
The estimate of twenty-five million migrants needs more explanation here. While that figure has been a useful and convenient approximation of the annual stock of migrants present in Arabia during the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is also a figure that can obscure more than it reveals. In our 2012 survey of low-income migrants in Qatar, for example, we were able to determine that the mean duration of stay for low-income migrant workers in the country was, at that time, five and a half years, and furthermore, that over half of the migrants we sampled had been present in Qatar for less than four years (Gardner et al. 2013, 5). As these data points suggest, the figure of twenty-five million might provide us with a synchronic glimpse of the migrant population at work on the Arabian Peninsula, but migrant turnover is high, and the mobilities orchestrated by this migration system are oftentimes cyclical in nature.4 From a diachronic vantage point—across the last decade, for example—many more millions of migrants are coming and going from the Arabian Peninsula than is apparent in any single year. Put another way, the estimate of twenty-five million migrants who might be present in any particular year excludes all of this coming and going. Additionally, the great majority of those transnational migrants arrive alone, and as I will contend in more detail later in this chapter, these solitary arrivals are best conceived not as agentive individual migrants but rather as the emissaries of household systems (and for readers familiar with South Asia, oftentimes emissaries of large, complicated “joint” households consisting of three or more generations of individuals related by blood or marriage). For both reasons, the figure of twenty-five million feels much too small to encompass the total number of humans embroiled in the Gulf migration system.5
Speaking of the GCC as a whole obscures some other unusual and noteworthy aspects of the spatial distribution of migrants in the constituent states and cities of the region. For example, in all six GCC states, temporary foreign workers make up a majority of the total workforce. But in Qatar and in several of the Emirates, foreign workers make up nearly nine of every ten residents—proportions somewhat unprecedented in the history of the nation-state. These dramatic proportions resemble those found in Kuwait, and also those found in some other cities and geographical pockets throughout the region. With so many foreign workers, and drawing those foreign workers from so many different sources, Qatar and the neighboring GCC states seem like an unusual permutation of the demographic superdiversity increasingly characteristic of the era of mobility.6 Additionally, in all of the GCC’s constituent states, migrant workers almost entirely stock the private sector’s workforce. Conversely, over many decades, employment in the public sector has emerged as the ideal form of employment for citizen-Arabs. As a result, in several of the Gulf states (including Qatar), nearly all employed citizens work in some capacity for the state itself, and although this bifurcation is beginning to erode in some places, it remains particularly characteristic of those states with the highest per capita levels of wealth.
Outmigration in the Gulf migration system is more geographically complicated. Speaking broadly, since the 1970s the bulk of the foreign workforce toiling on the Arabian Peninsula has been drawn from South Asia—from India but also from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The Philippines and a handful of other Southeast Asian countries also contribute migrants to the demographic stock of foreign workers in Arabia. Other Middle Eastern citizens, once numerically and culturally dominant among the migrant workforce in the region, continue to be important components of the transnational workforce present in the GCC, but this geographical contingent’s numerical dominance waned in the 1970s (Babar 2017; Norbakk 2020). Scholars of a variety of disciplinary stripes have explained the shift away from Arab labor in different ways: was the growing predominance of South Asian workers a reverberation of transnational connections established under the dominion of the British empire? Perhaps Gulf employers felt more comfortable exploiting the labor power of non-Muslims? Or were political concerns and anxieties about the fractious foreign Arab workforce at the front of the policy decisions that reshaped the Gulf migration system decades ago? Although all these explanations seem plausible, they hint at a more obvious certainty: the stock of migrants feeding into the transnational conduits of this migration system has evolved over time.
Those evolutions and changes have been apparent to me over two decades of research. In my time in Bahrain, for example (2002–2003), Nepalese migrants were a relatively new component of the foreign population at work there. In my time residing in Qatar (2008–2010), Vietnamese labor migrants were a new feature in the labor camps of the Industrial Area. And in my frequent visits to Qatar and to other states on the Arabian Peninsula since 2010, I have observed the presence of new migrant populations, particularly from several West African sending states. Through in-depth ethnographic scrutiny levied at the portion of this migration system operating in Nepal, my own analysis of the shifting constituent populations of the Gulf migration system points to this: over time, intrepid first migrants return home and help establish durable transnational conduits, a process often referred to as “chain migration.” In these regions of intensive, sustained, and circular migration, communities steadily accumulate a collective and informed understanding of the Gulf migration system.7 As a result, members of those communities have more knowledgeable and more experienced veteran migrants to draw upon for information; thus, potential migrants in these communities are better able to assess opportunities abroad. As those potential migrants and their communities become more knowledgeable, they become less exploitable and thereby more costly to employers. In this logic, the Gulf migration system inherently searches out greener pastures—including new migrant-sending states but also including more peripheral and far-flung regions in the current array of migrant-sending states. In my analysis, these mechanics help explain the constantly shifting migrant demography that I have observed over more than two decades of research.
Ethnography has been a particularly insightful tool in assessing the circumstances behind migrants’ decisions to enter the Gulf migration system, and to spend some portion of one’s working life in a place like Qatar (e.g., Osella and Osella 2000a, 2000b; Gamburd 2000). Via the numerous stories I have heard and collected in ethnographic interviews over the years, crises are a recurring and central feature of those circumstances. Readers encountered some of these threads in the previous chapter: wells dry up in sustained droughts, leaving small-scale agricultural households with an impendingly bleak future; the erosion, collapse, or absence of basic infrastructure (like electricity) torpedoes competent business plans and drives human capital to look beyond the proximate horizon for opportunity; patriarchs carry their families to bankruptcy with bad decisions and various vices, and households subsequently spiral into economic crisis and desperation; civil war, violence, and conflict render homelands dangerous or unlivable, with protagonists like the LTTE in Sri Lanka or the Maoists in Nepal peppering many of the stories I have collected. These are only a few examples of the specific circumstances that one encounters in sustained conversations with migrants about the motivations behind their departures from home. But these specificities belie the recurring general conditions that most potential migrants face: widespread unemployment and the absence of opportunity are conditions plaguing numerous regions, some entire countries, and arguably even portions of entire continents. Those larger geopolitical inequalities and the absence of the sorts of opportunity suggested by modern global capitalism reside at the foundations of the departures that fuel the Gulf migration system.
As noted earlier in this chapter, another key feature to recognize in the circumstances driving outmigration to Arabia is the fact that, in many cases, the migrants present in the Gulf states are best conceptualized as emissaries of household livelihood systems. Inspection reveals that migrants oftentimes hail from notably complex households, like the South Asian joint households. In short, the decision to migrate is frequently a household-level decision—a decision interwoven with the household’s attempt to navigate the sorts of crises described above, for example, or premised on the objective of paying for an older sibling’s continued education, or perhaps undertaken to repay the loans taken by the household unit for a sister’s dowry, or maybe just vaguely conceived as a pathway to help the household improve its general circumstances. In all these examples, the decision to migrate is pinned to the interests of others, and to the viability of the household as a coherent actor. Considering the fact that global policy environments remain dominated by the highly developed states of the global north, and moreover, that cosmopolitan scholarly conversations and critiques are epistemologically dominated by that same geography, there is a recurring tendency to treat Gulf migrants as rational individual agents, and to highlight the centrality of the nuclear family, rather than the complicated family structures that remain typical elsewhere in the world and in many of the sending states in the Gulf migration system. Both of these paradigmatic fragments—the conceptualization of migrants in the individualistic model of homo economicus, and the ongoing emphasis on the nuclear family in both the migrant’s social field and the policy environments that govern it—speak to the epistemological ethnocentricities that seep into our understandings of global difference and, in this case, our understandings of the Gulf migration system.
Although there are good reasons to remain attentive to the complicated circumstances from which Gulf migrants depart, the ethnographic approach is also well-configured to grapple with the motivations that migrants convey about their journey. These topics have been explored at length elsewhere (Gardner 2010a, 2012b). In summary, the wages and salaries available to potential migrants seeking work on the Arabian Peninsula are higher than those available at home, and are certainly the first and principal reason motivating almost all young men and women entering the Gulf migration system. To emphasize that point: the possibility of higher remuneration often figures centrally in individual migrants’ descriptions of the motivations behind their departure from home. Better remuneration is also a key feature in the calculus of migrant-sending households. But the importance and centrality of these financial concerns can also divert our attention from the constellation of other reasons and justifications that also drive outmigration. Some migrants frame their journey in terms of a search for opportunity—they are compelled simply by the possibilities of those Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns.” Others see the Gulf states as a proximate location where one might interface with the more developed and wealthier strata of our world. Their migrations are perhaps conceptualized as attempts to reach the circuits of global modernity, or to join portions of the world they have glimpsed in the global mediascape. For still others, the journey to Arabia is an escape from the strictures and limitations of home; migration to the Gulf might allow an Indian widow to escape the burdens of life in the shadow of a deceased husband, or allow a young Filipino to explore his homosexuality in the urban, cosmopolitanism context that the Gulf states foster.
Although my objective is to remain attentive to the specificity and diversity of migrants’ intentions, another feature of this migration system where outmigration’s social context and individual migrant motivations coalesce is in the emergence of Gulf migration as a veritable rite-of-passage in these sending states (see figure 8). Particularly in those regions with long-standing transnational connections to the Gulf states, the symbolic meaning and the social connotations of outmigration to Arabia have supplanted any specific motivational calculus. As a rite of passage, in some places migration to the Gulf states is what young men do—a quotidian and commonplace feature on the pathway to adulthood (Osella and Osella 2000a, 2000b; Bruslé 2009/2010, 154).8 Here, the general tenor of adventure, intrepidity, and an exploration of the unknown eclipses specific reasoning or pressing financial needs. In lectures and conversations with my American students, for example, I often suggest that a young migrant’s journey to Arabia sometimes seems to resemble my students’ decisions to venture off to college. In pondering their own decisions that led to their presence in my classroom, many can recognize that those decisions were untethered from any specific calculus, and that for many, college is what comes next upon concluding their secondary education.
For various combinations of these reasons, a young adult, often in coordination with his or her household, may intend to seek work in Arabia. Next, they must enter the Gulf migration system. The process of entering this migration system illuminates the array of stakeholders that constitute it, as well as the transnational footprint of the whole of this system. The multiple and various pathways to entry, in Iskander’s estimation, “straddle the line between legal and illicit activity” (2021, 235). But typically, labor brokerages in the migrant-sending states receive manpower requests from companies in the GCC states; in Nepal and other parts of South Asia, independent subagents oftentimes roam more rural areas, seeking to profit from connecting potential migrants to the employment opportunities listed by the labor brokerages. Some potential migrants can circumvent these brokers and subagents—particularly migrants, like Divendra, with personal networks that reach directly through other migrants to Gulf-based employers. Although expressly forbidden by various states in the Gulf migration system, the visas permitting migrants to work in the GCC states remain a commodity with high market value. In 2012, our survey of low-income workers in Qatar determined that migrants paid an average of US$1,031 for the right to work for two years in Qatar, and anecdotal evidence suggests these costs remain in place in most sending states.9 For many migrant-sending households, accumulating these entry fees to the Gulf migration system can be financially challenging. Households might sell off valuable and productive assets, mortgage property and land, pull other children from school, otherwise borrow the funds from moneylenders or banks, or configure some combination of these strategies to accumulate the necessary monies.
The aforementioned subagents, labor brokers, and moneylenders are only one phalanx of stakeholders in this migration system. In the sending states, we might add to that list the agencies that train workers in basic workplace skills. We should certainly include the sprawling and expanding government bureaucracies that seek to regulate outmigration, and deliver stamps, approvals, and required documents in exchange for fees. We could also include the burgeoning NGO sector that seeks to scrutinize and regulate outmigration. Let us not forget the hotels and guesthouses where predeparture migrants reside as they navigate this increasingly cumbersome departure bureaucracy (see figure 8), nor should we omit the many components of the transportation infrastructure that have arisen to carry millions of aspiring migrants from the rural hinterlands to urban hubs in migrant-sending states. The airlines shuttle migrants to the Gulf states, and upon arrival, migrants encounter employers, sponsors, new bureaucracies, and a constellation of additional stakeholders cultivated by these migratory conduits. In sum, this abbreviated anatomy certainly reveals the transnational nature of the Gulf migration system, for the various components of that system are indubitably cast between sending and receiving states. Considering that each of these stakeholders extracts some sort of fee or tax from the migrant’s journey, this anatomy also helps illuminate a point similar to the political scientist William Walters’s contention concerning what he called the deportation industry. Thinking about this transnational constellation of stakeholders in the Gulf migration system, we might more clearly refer to this system as a migration industry configured to extract profit from the mobilities seemingly requisite for many in the global, late-capitalist system and the era of mobility that it has produced.
Early in my attempts to interview migrants and learn more about their journeys I stumbled upon what anthropologist and methodologist James Spradley (1979) once called a grand tour question—the sort of question that seems to elicit a rich array of detail, emotion, and imagery from our ethnographic subjects. This is the precise stratum of ethnographic material and detailed information that fascinates those of us who are, foremost, concerned with trying to viscerally understand the experiences of others in this world. In shorthand, the grand tour question I stumbled upon asked migrants to recollect the details of their first day upon arrival in the Gulf. The resulting stories, impressions, and recollections are, like the migration narratives as a whole, replete with common threads and recurring experiences. For many of the Gulf migrants I have spoken with, those stories began with descriptions of their first plane ride, and many recollected anxiously marveling at their first experience aloft. Those stories contained numerous examples of confusion about various procedures in transit—at security check, disembarking from the plane, and so forth—and I have been perennially stunned by how many migrants recall spending many hours, and sometimes days, waiting to be retrieved from the airport and transported to their accommodations. Migrants commonly recollect the long drives through the glistening cityscape to those accommodations, and those memorable journeys often conclude at dormitory-style labor camps located at the periphery of the city. Most poignantly, these migrant recollections frequently narrate the moment when the dreams and aspirations they have brought from home meet the grave and often-challenging realities now visible before them.
The Kafala
In her seminal 1997 monograph Walls Built on Sand, the anthropologist Anh Nga Longva identified the sponsorship system as the key feature structuring the relationships between citizens and foreign workers in Kuwait. That sponsorship system, widely referred to by the Arabic term kafala, distinguishes the Gulf migration system from many other extant migration systems.10 Building on the vantage point that Longva (1997) first provided to us, in my analysis I suggest that the kafala orchestrates relations between foreign workers, citizens, and the state. Although there has been much discussion of the kafala and its role in shaping social relations on the Arabian Peninsula, Diop and his coauthors usefully reduce the kafala to three key features for the purposes of our analysis: via the kafala, migrants may enter the country only under the sponsorship of a local person or legal entity; in the relationship established by the kafala, the sponsor assumes responsibility for the migrant’s living and working conditions; and finally, by the kafala’s strictures, a sponsor’s permission is required to change employment or to depart the country (Diop, Johnston, and Trung Le 2016).
This is a useful distillation of the foundational elements of the contemporary kafala, and there are several important points to make here. First, while the policies and regulations vary between countries, scholars generally agree that the kafala exists somewhere between custom and law.11 In my analyses, I often point to the customary norms and attitudes that have sedimented in sponsor-migrant relations in the region—sedimented around the highly unequal relations structured by the kafala (Gardner 2018; see also Alloul 2021). Second, we might recognize that the kafala takes responsibility for governing foreign workers from the state and, instead, distributes that responsibility and those obligations to citizen-sponsors and employers. As the scholar Noora Lori (2019, 140–141) describes it, “the mechanisms for enforcing temporary residency are widely dispersed while authority over residency decisions remains highly concentrated.”12 In essence, we might recognize that the kafala invests citizens with responsibilities and duties that many Western analysts and critics envision instead as the appropriate purview of the state. With that vista point in mind, Natasha Iskander (2021, 8) illuminatingly suggests that how citizens deploy the rights and powers afforded them by the kafala is of central interest in grappling with the impact of this migration system on the foreign workforce.
Third, and perhaps most crucially, in distributing those responsibilities to citizens and their proxies, and in the context of the unfree labor market that results, one can also perceive the underlying mechanics of the dramatic variability in migrant experiences resulting from these systemic arrangements. In the kafala system, migrants’ fates are pinned directly on the behavior, goodwill, and capacities of their sponsor. Should a new migrant arrive in Qatar to find a sponsor who is concerned about his well-being, who pays him on time, who abides by the complexities of the law, and who perhaps helps the migrant overcome the unexpected calamities that can arise in human life, migrants may have an entirely positive experience. With remittances fueling new possibilities for a household back home, the migrant may opt to return for additional contract periods, which are typically two years in length. Other migrants arrive in Qatar to encounter sponsors who are unconcerned or exploitative. With the unconcerned sponsors, I am also seeking to clarify that sponsors and employers are, in Qatar, oftentimes not the same individual, and that as a result of these commonplace arrangements, many migrants have little or no direct contact with their official sponsors after arrival. Exploitation at the hands of the sponsor’s proxies—the migrant’s employer, typically—can happen without the sponsor’s knowledge. While those sorts of arrangements are common, there are also exploitative or otherwise problematic sponsors of all sorts, as one would expect. Via the kafala, the migrant lacks the capacity to seek employment elsewhere or to depart the country altogether.
All of this is to say that as a result of the kafala and the social relations it orchestrates, migrants’ experiences are highly variable. The structural arrangements of this system, built as they are around the individual sponsor, explain the extraordinary variability in the migrant experience observed in Arabia. This variability makes the whole of this migration theater prone to journalistic and analytic cherry-picking; in any Gulf state, it is easy to find ten migrants with horror stories about their experience, and easy enough to find ten others who are happy with their fate, if not journeying along a veritable rags-to-riches trajectory. In the context of such variability, it is perhaps noteworthy that many journalists, activists, the algorithms that drive social media platforms, and some researchers (including ethnographers) oftentimes present, highlight, or emphasize only stories at the negative extremes of the Gulf migration experience.13
No summarization of the kafala would be complete without a discussion of the changes now afoot on the Arabian Peninsula. For the two decades that I have pursued an ethnographic understanding of migration to the region, the constituent Gulf states have periodically (and publicly) announced the dismantling of the kafala.14 Just a few years after I departed my fieldwork in Bahrain, for example, the island Kingdom announced the kafala would soon be abolished.15 There are numerous similar examples announced by various GCC states in the interim, but in 2015, Qatar began to amend the law regulating entry, exit, and residence of foreigners on the Qatari Peninsula, and then subsequently announced its intention to dismantle key portions of legal framework underpinning the kafala. With decades of similar announcements from GCC members amounting to little or no significant change in migrants’ actual circumstances, there is plenty of ridicule and sustained criticism being directed at Qatar, despite the changes implemented or otherwise underway.16 For example, in her largely even-handed early assessment of these changes, Iskander (2021, 69–71) notes that these revisions to the kafala’s legal footprint have essentially taken powers and rights formerly distributed to the sponsor or employer and consolidated them in the state itself.
These sorts of insights and long-standing criticisms of the kafala, while invaluable, should not eclipse the more fundamental changes clearly visible here. In Qatar, migrant workers no longer need their employer’s permission to change jobs, and the state has ceased requiring foreign workers to obtain permission from employers to exit the country. In addition, and beyond the ambit of the kafala, Qatar also implemented a new minimum wage of QAR 1,000, while also stipulating additional minimums for the costs of food and housing.17 In addition to introducing the region’s first nondiscriminatory minimum wage, Qatar also moved previously excluded domestic workers under additional protections parallel to the national Labor Law. Several neighboring nations have now announced similar intentions to deconstruct aspects of the kafala.18 Again, with these substantial changes afoot, it remains too early to assess the impact of these changes in Qatar or in the neighboring states. While we await impartial and empirically grounded assessments of these tectonic changes to the foundations of the Gulf migration system, or at least to its Qatari manifestation, however, journalists and activists will continue to set the tenor of the global public’s reception of the changes proposed to the kafala.
Assessing the Gulf Migration System
This anatomy of the Gulf migration system provides a generalized birds-eye view of the transnational system that functions as a central structural force in the lives of many millions of transnational migrants, their citizen-hosts, and the households from which those migrants come. Although the scope of this anatomy has allowed me to briefly visit numerous different junctures and actors in this migration system, there are also notable omissions here. For example, for the most part I have treated the population of migrants at work on the Arabian Peninsula as a whole, and devoted little attention to the hierarchies, stratifications, and differences that have coalesced in this transnational field. These stratifications, although materially anchored in class, often manifest on identitarian lines: migrants’ nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, caste, linguistic capacity, perceptions of that migrant’s racial location, and numerous other features shape the overall migrant demography on the Arabian Peninsula, and any individual migrant’s experience therein. The structure and nuances of those hierarchies are the central topics of the next chapter. But this overview also omits any discussion of the process by which migrants find their way to illegality in the system I have just described, nor have I addressed the role that misinformation and disinformation play in the calculus of potential migrants’ decisions to venture to the Gulf (Gardner 2012; Pessoa, Harkness, and Gardner 2014). Moreover, in this sustained focus on the Gulf migration system, the city itself has slipped out of focus.
While others may see things in this anatomy that I fail to recognize or address, there are two threads woven through this material that I suggest merit attention. First, the sociologist and political economist Stephen Castles (1999, 10) took an estimation of the integral role that social networks played in enabling the migrations and movements that, from the vantage point of the present, now seem to be quotidian features of the contemporary era. In speaking to their power, he also noted that these social networks can “metamorphose into an alternative and competing form of institutional regulation: the “migration industry” with its plethora of informal and commercial recruiters, agents and other facilitators for international migration.” This seems prescient for the time: in the Gulf migration system, these “informal and commercial” elements remain a durable presence in the migration narratives summarized in this anatomy. Writing just a few years after Castles, the political scientist William Walters turned his attention to the enduring prevalence of deportation in the world, and expanding upon the idea that Castles’s had previously ventured, Walters (2002, 266) established a more expansive definition of what he terms a deportation industry: “a system which implicates all manner of agents—not just police and immigration officials, but airline executives, pilots, stewards, and other passengers. Most pointedly, we are reminded that private companies make money from this form of suffering. Deportation is a business.”
Again, there is good and somewhat obvious evidence that connects the Gulf migration system to Castles’s notion of a migration industry. Many rural Nepalese migrants’ journey to Arabia commences via a dalal, a word used to describe the informal subagents who roam the rural hinterlands (and a word that can also be translated to English as a pimp). There are a variety of other informal and commercial junctures along the migrant’s path, each another juncture at which some small profit might be extracted from the aspiring migrant for some service or another. Like Walters, in assessing the migration narratives at the root of this ethnography, I fail to see any clear distinctions between the subagents at the very front end of a Nepalese migrant’s journey and the statal bureaucracies that extract fees for some necessary form or official stamp, nor between the dalal and the official bureaucrat who may move the migrant’s paperwork along only after a bribe has been received. Like Watts’s concept of a petroleum complex discussed in an earlier chapter, there is some coherent logic to a holistic apprehension of the migration system that’s arisen around these transnational mobilities. Recognizing all these junctures and stakeholders—the institutions, businesses, agents, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, hoteliers, employers, sponsors, and more—as components of a singular whole allows us to better perceive the profit-seeking nature of the Gulf migration system, and therefore, its footprint as a complicated, vast, transnational, and decentralized industry. As Natasha Iskander (2021, 225) notes in her careful and detailed analysis, some even contend that this migration industry, more than simply facilitating transnational mobility, now actively drives the outmigration process.
I also think there are good countervailing arguments to consider here. As an anthropologist, I am wary of the quasi-Marxist classification of these varied and diverse actors into the essentializing categories of either exploiters or the exploited. In that simplistic logic, how might we classify the families that send their son to the Gulf, or those men like Sam, the return migrant from the previous chapter who helps send other young men along the same route he once pioneered? What about Vasu’s mother’s employer and sponsor, who in the previous chapter provided a room for Vasu while he recovered from his injuries? And I am equally wary of the fact that, unlike the subjects in Walters’s deportation industry, most migrants to Arabia enter this system voluntarily.19 In summary, while I can see the logic of framing the Gulf migration system as a profit-extracting industry, the simplifications and reductions required therein fail to encompass the human complexities of the many different agents and stakeholders who comprise this whole.
It is this penchant for analytic simplification—for the reduction of the ambivalences and complexities we find everywhere in the human experience—that leads to a second concluding point by which we might draw together several other threads woven through this chapter. While countless others in contemporary academia are adroitly attuned to extant imperialisms, to the legacy of colonialism, and to the role that the production of knowledge seems to play in either establishing or preserving various aspects of the inequality characteristic of all human societies, few of those academicians are concerned with the sort of epistemological ethnocentricities that I perceive lurking in the anatomy of Gulf migration I’ve presented here. Those ethnocentricities, together, can fuel a sort of epistemological and interpretive imperialism that continues to dominate our global intellectual landscape.
As the philosopher Kwame Appiah recently noted, ethnographers have long devoted substantial energy to introspection, to assessing the veracity of their own frameworks of understanding as they navigate their analysis across thresholds of cultural and historical difference.20 In presenting this anatomy of the Gulf migration system, my attention has been, in part, devoted to the framework of our understanding itself. For example, as discussed earlier, the idea of family promoted in much migration theorization and in many migration policies is typically a conceptualization of family cast in the Western image. Likewise, in theorizing about migrants and the calamities they may encounter in this migration system, scholars often promote a kind of rationality and individualism that also traces its roots to Western liberalism. Similarly, the social prism by which we oftentimes conceptually subdivide the stock of transnational migrants in Arabia (frequently to critique some aspect of that migration system) also reflects its American (if not European) pedigree. Even the lodestar of integration—not elaborated in this chapter, but the absence around which so many critical assessments of the Gulf migration system orbit—seems like another American value that has slipped into the deep mechanics of our scholarly calculations and the conversations that result. Although I have tried to sidestep these epistemological ethnocentricities as best I can, and thereby to live up to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1963) notion of reasoning on a basis sensible to all possible observers, I am uncertain if the impartiality I advocate has been fully demonstrated here. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to shed the conviction I first encountered upon concluding Iskander’s critical assessment about the politics of skill in this migration system: that via our collective attempts to improve the conditions of the many and diverse migrants on the move in the contemporary world, are we perhaps facilitating the consolidation of those various migration systems, and, in the process, reconstructing them to be in tighter alignment with neoliberal norms and American values?
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