“Thousands of migrants detained and deported across GCC, with no regards to their rights”

Another wave of detention and deportation campaigns have taken place across the GCC in recent months, particularly in Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. Weekly, officials report hundreds of migrant workers detained in searches and raids. Most workers are detained for having inaccurate or expired documentation, but also for often undefined “violations of the labour law” and even traffic violations. Workers detained in these campaigns are generally subject to administrative deportation, and do not have the means or the opportunity to contest their case…

… As MR has previously reported in our coverage of detention and deportation campaigns in the Gulf, attention must be paid to the reasons migrant workers become irregular in the first place — which tie back to duplicitous recruitment processes, exploitative working conditions, and employers’ control over renewing workers residency and visa status. The frequent recurrence of these campaigns in parallel with uptick in recruitment also reveals the fundamental disconnect between stated policy aims — to reduce the irregular migrant population and — and the Gulf’s migrant-dependent labour market, which both fosters the exploitation that pushes workers into irregularity and encourages unbounded recruitment.