Purveyors of dreams: labour recruiters in the Pakistan to Saudi Arabia migration corridor

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an empirical account of how Pakistani labour recruiters, or ‘overseas employment promotors’ (OEPs), manage the needs and expectations of their migrant-clients while contending with the challenges of state governance. OEPs’ first-hand accounts suggest that they are frustrated by their inability to adequately ensure that the migrants they send to the Persian Gulf will thrive from the experience. OEPs identify three main issues that affect their ability to do their job well: unscrupulous recruiters and companies based in the Gulf who use the issuance of labour contracts to extract profits from migrants and Pakistani recruiters; a lack of support both from the Pakistani and Saudi Arabian state to address core issues that hamper migrants’ success; and the challenge of mediating long-distance on behalf of their migrant-clients once they are working in the Gulf.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour recruiters
• migration
• Pakistan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This paper is the outcome of fieldwork funded by INCITE, Columbia University, through its REALM (Research and Empirical Analysis of Labor Migration) grant. The author wishes to express her grateful thanks to Professor Peter Bearman and his team for all their invaluable support for this project.

2. OEP or overseas employment promotor is used in official nomenclature to designate labour recruiters in Pakistan, and will be used to designate labour agencies/agents in this paper.

3. Use of the masculine pronoun is for linguistic ease and because all the Overseas Employment Agencies interviewed for this paper only processed visas for male migrant workers.

4. This section of the paper draws on a series of interviews that took place between May 8–18, 2017 with overseas employment promotors (OEPs) in two locations in Pakistan: Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Rawalpindi/Islamabad.

5. At the Protectorate of Overseas Migrants office in Peshawar stated we were told this is factually incorrect. Every Foreign Service Agreement must be advertised, no matter the number of workers being sought for a job contract.

6. All names assigned to interviewees in this paper are pseudonyms, and all agency names have been similarly anonymized.

7. Migrants’ finger printing/biometric scans are done at the Saudi Etimad Office, and all medical tests are taken at designated laboratories that have been approved by GCC Approved Medical Centers Association (GAMCA) office. The Protectorate of Emigrants Office is the provincial level office of the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment.

8. Pathans or Pashtuns are the majority ethno-linguistic group populating the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan.

9. The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Pakistan’s national law enforcement agency, has a mandate to prevent and suppress, irregular migration and migrant smuggling. Migrants and their families who have been defrauded by OEPs may make complaints to the FIA. The Protectorate of Emigrants Offices are the regional level bodies of the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment.

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Zahra Babar

Zahra Babar is Associate Director for Research at CIRS at Georgetown University in Qatar. She previously worked for the United Nations Development Program and the International Labour Organization. Her current research interests include rural development, migration and labor policies, and citizenship in the Persian Gulf states. She has published several articles and book chapters, most recently, “Labor Migration in the Persian Gulf”, in  The Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics, Ed., Mehran Kamrava (Routledge, 2020); “Migrant labor and human rights in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries”, in Why Human Rights Still Matter in Contemporary Global Affairs, Ed., Mahmood Monshipouri, (Routledge, 2020); “Understanding Labour Migration Policies in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries“ in Asianization of Migrant Workers in the Gulf Countries, eds. S. Irudaya Rajan and Ginu Zacharia Oommen, (Springer, 2020); “Gender and Mobility: Qatar’s Highly Skilled Female Migrants in Context,„ with M. Ewers and N. Khattab, Migration and Development, (2020), “Im/mobile Highly Skilled Migrants in Qatar,” with M. Ewers and N. Khattab, in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2019); “Enduring ‘Contested’ Citizenship in the Gulf Cooperation Council,” The Middle East in Transition: The Centrality of Citizenship, (2018); “The ‘Enemy Within’: Citizenship-Stripping in the Post-Arab Spring GCC,” Middle East Journal (2017); “The ‘Humane Economy:’ Migrant Labour and Islam in Qatar and the UAE,” in Sociology of Islam (2017);“Population, Power, and Distributional Politics in Qatar,” Journal of Arabian Studies (2015) and “The Cost of Belonging: Citizenship Construction in the State of Qatar,” Middle East Journal (2014). She served as editor for a special issue of the Middle East Journal titled “Citizenship” (2019), editor of the volume Arab Migrant Communities in the GCC (Oxford University Press/Hurst 2017), and coeditor with M. Kamrava, Migrant Labour in the Persian Gulf (Columbia University Press/Hurst 2012).