Migration Governance: Moving Away from “Uncle Always Knows”

Almost everyone on social media has that one Instagram friend who posts bronzed pictures in Santorini, or screenshots of champagne flutes atop the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai skyline looming in the background.  To those internationals for whom travelling on holiday was an annual rite of passage, the pandemic’s travel restrictions resulted in adventures that were inopportunely thwarted. Conversely, to economic migrants everywhere, the implications of banned travel, whether by air, train, or foot, equated directly with the fundamental ability to survive. The scrambles of governments worldwide to gauge appropriate responses to COVID-19 was understandable, inasmuch the magnitude of the event was entirely unprecedented, and the need to contain its spread dire. Yet, one of the largest follies of the pandemic remains undebated: instinctive government responses moved to ban travel without duly considering the global interconnectedness of labour markets in the modern age. Belonging to one state but working in another meant that with travel bans, economic migrants were either shackled to their workplaces, away from their families; or held back from gainful employment whilst trapped at home. In most contexts, migrants are to countries like an unknown opening band at a music concert: the audience does not fundamentally care, and everybody is simply waiting for the headline act. In their origin states, migrant workers often escape the focus of governments who are more concerned with those who remain behind. In the meanwhile, the countries to which they migrate often look at them as charity, despite these workers’ crucial role in economic development. Since they belong to places differently, being of and from multiple geographies at once, migrant workers have shifted typical state-worker relationships to a new realm. What, therefore, does good governance look like for an individual- a migrant– who is from several places at once?

Multiple answers to this question can be gleaned from The South Asia to Gulf Migration Complex. As the title suggests, the volume focuses on the South Asia-Gulf migration nexus. There are various considerations that render this book highly topical. First, the movement of people around the world, particularly for employment, has outmoded traditional conceptions of citizenship and a worker’s relationship with a state. This necessitates the re-engineering of these traditional conceptions of citizenship in ways that account for a dynamic and modern global workforce which is constantly on the move. Second, a fitting place to start thinking about the redefinition of worker-state relations is from the lens of workers emigrating from South Asia into the Arab Gulf. These geographies are of particular significance given the staggering volume of South Asian emigrants in the Arab Gulf, with over 80 percent of the region’s labour force being comprised of migrants, as Blarel and Ennis describe in their introduction. Governing this sizeable migrant workforce is what is collectively termed Kafala, a complex set of legal and policy frameworks centred around an employer-oriented visa sponsorship system. For years now, the Kafala system has come under severe criticism from human rights groups for rendering low-wage migrant workers in various conditions of modern day slavery, most recently with the example of Qatar, during the FIFA 2022 World Cup. Further compounding the importance of the South Asia-Gulf nexus is the phenomenon of South-South migration, where the Gulf’s ambitious development projects tend to drive largescale demands for a workforce that can be tailored to expand and contract as per their whimsy (Ennis and Blarel; Hamadah; Walton-Roberts et al). Above all, this volume is timely given the now universal tussle between the need for good governance and sustainable worker livelihoods on the one hand, versus competing pressures for labour market flexibility on the other (Devkota; Babar; Hamadah).