Virus forces Persian Gulf states to reckon with migrant labour

The Kuwaiti talk show panelists were holding forth on an issue that the coronavirus has pushed to the forefront of national debate: Whether their tiny, oil-rich monarchy should rely as heavily as it does on foreign labourers, who have suffered most of the country’s infections and borne much of the cost of its lockdown.

“Go to malls in Kuwait — would you ever see a Kuwaiti working there?” said one guest, Ahmad Baqer. “No. They’re all different nationalities.”

Not long after, a South Asian man slipped into the camera frame, serving tea to each panelist from a tray. He appeared three times during the program, his presence unacknowledged except by one panelist who waved away a fresh cup.

In the Middle East’s wealthiest societies, the machinery of daily life depends on migrant labourers from Asia, Africa and poorer Arab countries — millions of “tea boys,” housemaids, doctors, construction workers, deliverymen, chefs, garbagemen, guards, hairdressers, hoteliers and more, who often outnumber the native population.

They support families back home by doing the jobs citizens cannot or will not take. But as oil revenues plummet, migrant labour camps become coronavirus hot spots and citizens demand that their governments protect them first, the pandemic has prompted a reckoning with the status quo.

Hostility toward foreigners is growing louder. So are questions about how to replace migrants with citizens and calls for reforming the way foreign labour is imported and treated.

For many of the Arab states’ foreign workers, who sent more than $124 billion to their home countries in 2017, the coronavirus’ fallout is bleakly straightforward.

Tens of thousands have lost their jobs during government-ordered lockdowns, leaving them to ration dwindling food supplies while their families struggle without their remittances. Others have fallen sick as the coronavirus tears through their meagre, crowded dormitory-style housing.

With oil prices slashed and tourism gone, host countries in the Persian Gulf, which account for more than a tenth of the world’s migrants, may have to revise their relationship with foreign labour.

“Before, there was enough to go around,” said Karen Young, a Gulf specialist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “But now states are working with half of what they had three months ago, and the cuts are coming. There’ll be more discussion about what the state provides to citizens and noncitizens.”

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