Racialised institutional humiliation through the Kafala

ABSTRACT

The kafala system of migrant sponsorship prevalent in the Middle East has long been the subject of scholarly and public scrutiny, due to the high level of reported abuse of migrant workers. Prevalent analyses of the kafalaview it as a rentier system that offers economic opportunities for both non-national migrant workers and citizen sponsor-employers, despite the inherent structural asymmetries that bias the overall economic benefits towards the latter. However, the racialised incorporation of African and Asian migrant workers within the kafala is rarely considered in such analyses. Drawing on intersectional, critical race perspectives, this paper ‘de-centres the white gaze’ in the scholarship on race and migration by first, shifting the geographic locus outside Europe/America to analyse racialisation of migrant workers in the Middle East, and second, by drawing on scholars from the global South who theorise systematic humiliation as a manifestation of deeply unequal societies. The paper illuminates the operation of the kafala as a racially stratified occupational hierarchy of migrant workers that is legitimated by an hegemonic ideology and practices of degradation, diffused coercion and state enforcement. The paper also ‘de-exceptionalises the Middle East’ to argue that while these racialised hierarchies of difference in the kafala sustain and expand the possibilities of capitalist accumulation through the expropriation of migrant labour, they are not unique to the Middle East.

Keywords:

• Racism
• kafala
• institutional humiliation
• migrant worker
• middle-east

Introduction: centring racism in the analysis of the kafala

This paper argues that a structure of racialised institutional humiliation is central to the operation of the kafala, the system of migrant sponsorship prevalent in the Middle East. Centring racism in this way is in marked contrast to typical analyses of the kafala which tend to be located in one of two dominant perspectives, both of which do not explicitly consider race. The first political-economy perspective focuses on the kafala as a rentier system, and views the formal and informal operation of the kafala as offering economic opportunities for both nationals and non-nationals, despite the inherent structural asymmetries between non-national migrant workers and citizen sponsor-employers that bias the overall economic benefits towards the latter (Hertog 2010; Dito 2015). An analytic focus on race is also largely absent from scholarly work within the second, political perspective on the kafala, which draws on the seminal work of Anh Nga Longva (1997), who argues that the kafala is essential to the maintenance of an ethnocratic political regime in Kuwait (and other scholars have argued by extension, in other parts of the Middle East). In this perspective, the relationship of national citizens to their monarchical rulers is premised on the existence and political subordination via the kafala, of a vast labouring population of right-less non-citizen migrant workers. Longva explicitly excludes race as a determinant of the ‘ethnocracy’ prevalent in Kuwait, arguing that it is the citizen/non-citizen divide that is foundational to the political structure of these societies (Longva 1997, 119). However, Longva’s theoretical exclusion of race invisibilises the experiences of people of African and Asian descent who are citizens of countries in the Middle East (see Abulhawa 2013) and reinforces the ‘culture of silence’ (Menin 2020, 77) surrounding discussions of racism in the Middle East.

While acknowledging the importance of the citizen/non-citizen divide, this paper draws on Sharma to re-open for consideration the role of ‘racism as central to the construction of the “others” of citizenship' (Sharma 2015, 98). I foreground race as an analytical perspective that has hitherto been invisibilised in discussions of the kafala. Situated within a critical race perspective, the paper assumes ‘procedures of racialization and capitalism are ultimately never separable from each other’ (Melamed 2015, 77) and that the racial coding of migrants is necessarily connected to strategies of commodification and exploitation of labour within global capitalist systems (Hamadah 2020; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018; Vora 2016). This perspective is important particularly for an analysis of the working conditions of African and Asian migrant workers, as it is no accident that we find primarily black and brown labouring bodies toiling in precarious and often exploitative, dehumanising conditions in the Middle East, and elsewhere globally. Interpolating an intersectional gender, class and nationality analysis along with a critical race perspective is also helpful to illuminate other extant contradictions of the kafala, for example, those inherent in the relatively privileged positions of Asian and African descent people who are citizens of the global North, but work as ‘expats’ in the Middle East

There are perhaps two key reasons for the relative lack of explicit attention to racism towards migrant workers in the Middle East. First, globally, academic debates on race and racism have predominantly been produced in relation to ‘whiteness’ – both within formerly colonised contexts and within the context of Europe, North America and Australia. Racialised attitudes, behaviours and institutions in the Middle East are often occluded from view on the implicit assumption that racial difference is always only positioned in relation to the presence of ‘whiteness’. Consequently, the institutional and inter-personal dimensions of racism underlying the incorporation of African and Asian migrant workers within the kafala are rarely considered. A second possible reason for the analytic invisibility of race is that the Middle East was an imperial hinterland that was managed by colonial powers primarily through protectorates, mandates and trucial agreements. The dramatic transformations of the region in the post-colonial period through the discovery of oil has meant that the ‘trace histories’ – to use Wolfe’s (2016) highly evocative term – of the racial consequences of these imperial legacies would need to be explicitly mined and made visible.

This paper will overlay the dominant perspectives of the kafala described above with an analysis that focuses on race and its intersections with citizenship, class and gender. The paper proceeds as follows: in the first section, I discuss the origins of the kafala and delineate its characteristic features. The second section presents a synoptic review of contemporary theoretical perspectives on racism and migration, highlighting and justifying elements of these approaches that I consider most suitable for my analysis in this paper. Specifically, I argue that a critical race perspective incorporating the concept of institutional humiliation (Parekh 2009) is useful to analyse the effects of the kafala on those of its subjects who are most deeply disadvantaged by it through the intersections of race, citizenship, class and gender. I go on to demonstrate this claim in the third section, drawing on the well-developed scholarship on migrant workers in the Middle East. In the concluding section, following Kanna, Le Renard and Vora’s (2020) call to deconstruct ‘exceptionalist representations’ about the Arabian Peninsula, I argue that far from being ‘exceptional’ to the Middle East, the racialised institutional humiliation of migrants in the kafala is but a locally specific manifestation of the deeply hierarchical and exploitative migrant-citizen relationships that have been produced by racialised capitalism globally.

The kafala

The kafala is the system of migrant sponsorship prevalent across the countries of the Middle East. The word kafala is the noun form of the root word k-f-l, which connotes three sets of meanings: to feed or support, to provide bail or guarantee, and to sponsor or be the legal guardian (Longva 1997). There are multiple theories on the origin of the term, with some authors pointing to Bedouin traditions of hospitality towards visitors (Beauge 1986 as cited in Damir-Geilsdorf and Pelican 2018). Others point to the Islamic tradition of a guarantor providing ‘an assurance of the fulfillment of an obligation of the guaranteed person’ such as guaranteeing the repayment of a debt, bail money, or for the delivery and purchase of goods (Jureidini and Hassan 2020, 94). While the contract guaranteed in such cases was not for employment, importantly, as Jureidini and Hassan observe, they were underwritten by an Islamic ethic of ‘trust and protection’ implied by the service of guarantor that was intended to be free of charge; an ethic that is violated by contemporary forms of the kafala as an employment contract (Jureidini and Hassan 2020, 105).

In contrast to the former accounts, Longva’s (1997) authoritative and much cited account traces the origins of the kafala to the systems of indentured labour contracts in the Gulf states, particularly among pearl divers. Extending this analysis, Al Shehabi argues that the system to control pearl divers was subsequently adopted by British colonial administrators in the Gulf as a ‘cheap’ strategy to control labour and police empire across the Indian Ocean, by introducing sponsorship requirements to control the increasing numbers of migrant workers in the expanding oil industry (Al Shehabi 2019). Implicit in these origin narratives are competing conceptualisations of the kafala on the one hand, as a mechanism by which foreigners may be incorporated into a society and ‘taken responsibility for’; and on the other hand, as a mechanism of labour control.

It is the latter version of the kafala as a mechanism of labour control that is prevalent in the oil-rich Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in other countries of the Middle East such as Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Yemen. A key feature of the Gulf countries is the relatively large populations of ‘foreign-born’ migrant workers, who in some cases far outnumber the ‘native-born’ citizens, thus making the kafala essential to a political economy of informal practices to ‘manage’ the influx of foreigners, which gradually became formalised through the diffuse assemblage of these practices with regulations and laws. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to investigate variations in the legislation and implementation of the kafala across these countries, in effect, the common feature is that any foreigner who seeks to enter a country for work can only do so if they are sponsored by a kafeel (sponsor, usually also the employer). The kafeel may be an individual or a company and is usually a national citizen with the capacity to financially support the sponsored person, though in some Gulf countries, middle- and upper-class foreigners can also sponsor migrant workers. Thus the defining feature of the kafala is that the state delegates responsibility to the kafeel (the sponsor–employer) for both the employment of the migrant and their residence permit (iqama) in the country. The migrant is thus tied to the kafeel in an asymmetrical power relationship, and cannot exit the employment contract or the country without the latter’s permission.

In a comprehensive analysis of the kafala in Gulf countries, Dito (2015) observes that although there are legally only two categories of foreigners sponsored through the kafala – migrant workers and migrant domestic workers – in practice, there are several distinct patterns of employment. Employment in a private sector company and employment in a private household for domestic work are the two formally recognised patterns of regular employment. The other patterns of employment are common practice but are not formally legally recognised. For instance, in the case of outsourced labour, the recruitment of migrant workers (and their residence permits) is managed by one company, but their labour may be used by another company.

Perhaps the most significant common practice is the kafala as a rent-seeking activity, in which the migrant worker pays rent (as a lumpsum or monthly payment) to the kafeel to process their iqama. In the two variants of this pattern, the migrant may work as ‘freelancer’ for any employer, or the kafeel may make an unofficial agreement with the migrant for the latter to operate a small business, paying the kafeel a commission. Rent-seeking through the kafala is widely prevalent throughout the Middle East, though it is technically illegal. It has produced a labour brokerage society in which lucrative rents can be obtained by ordinary citizens simply because of their citizenship (Hertog 2010). Thus, the kafala is frequently condemned as the source of the injustices faced by migrant workers, and governments in the Middle East periodically announce proposals to abolish the system (; Jureidini and Hassan 2020; Thiollet 2019). For instance, as the host of the 2022 FIFA football cup, Qatar was in the international spotlight for the abuse of migrant workers and made a series of announcements abolishing the kafala. However, this consists largely of changes to the legal language to emphasise a secular contractual relationship between employer and employee (rather than one based on Islamic ethics), which does not eliminate the elements of control over, and exploitation of, migrant workers (Jureidini and Hassan 2020) . As scholars have argued, the kafala persists because of the lucrative incomes national citizens earn from the trade-in sponsorship (Hertog 2010) and because it offers states in the Middle East an effective political mechanism of surveillance over the vast and economically essential population of migrant workers (Crystal 2005).

While these insights inform the understanding of the kafala in this paper, I argue that although the primary axis of stratification of the kafala is the citizen–non-citizen divide, state institutions construct zones of exceptions and freedoms for different groups of non-citizens in practices of migrant governance through the kafala that are differentially organised by nationality, race and class. ‘Expats’ are positioned at the upper end of the kafala hierarchy: generally, expats are citizens of OECD countries, usually ‘white’/Caucasian Europeans, North Americans or Australians, who have been enticed to work for lucrative, tax-free salaries in global companies and in the education sector. The residence and employment of these expats is also contingent on sponsorship by a kafeel, however, they are relatively privileged migrants, hired for the symbolic superiority denoted by their ‘whiteness’ (Vora and Koch 2015; Kanna 2014). Indeed, their status is indicated by the use of the label ‘expat’ rather than ‘migrant’ as an identifier. Vora (2014) self-reflexively observes that a tiny minority of ‘expats’ may be non-White, i.e. of Asian or African backgrounds, but citizens of the global North. Such Asian or African ‘expats’ may not be as privileged as white expats, nevertheless their citizenship and class place them towards the top of the kafala hierarchy.

In the middle tiers of the kafala hierarchy are a vast range of professional and semi-professional workers who fulfil clerical, retail, medical, educational and other technological needs in the economy. Many of these are citizens of other Arab countries (particularly Egypt, Syria and Lebanon), from the Philippines and from the Indian sub-continent. Here too, it is important to also pay attention to the intersections of class and nationality in the kafala, as demonstrated by Vora’s ethnographic study of how middle- and upper-class Indian business people in Dubai are often ‘Non-Citizen Kafeels’ who recruit, manage and in some cases, exploit, working-class Indians (Vora 2013, 109–116).

At the bottom of the kafala hierarchy, we find migrant labourers working in ‘4-D’ (dirty, demeaning, dangerous and difficult) jobs – primarily construction workers and domestic workers from African and Asian countries. Migrant domestic workers experience specific forms of gendered exclusions under the kafala; as I discuss later, they are excluded from the purview of labour laws.

‘Expats’, non-citizen business people and migrant workers all have to negotiate with kafeels and navigate the kafala: their legal status is subject to continued sponsorship by the kafeel, and they have to ensure their residence permits and employment papers are renewed regularly in order to work in the Middle East. However, their differential capacity to do so is fundamentally constituted through stratified hierarchies of race, citizenship, gender and class. It must be noted that such differentiated, racialised hierarchies are similar to those faced by non-citizen, migrant ‘others’ in countries of the global North, and are therefore not unique to the kafala. I turn now to review theoretical lenses through which such hierarchies may be analysed.

Theorising racism in migration studies

Recent scholarship has problematised the paradox of the centrality of race, racialisation and racism to migration studies, yet its relative invisibility as an analytic lens. I discuss here three recent and useful meta-reviews that have each developed different and overlapping categorisations of the ways in which race is, and is not, conceptualised and articulated in the field of migration studies (Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou 2015; Erel, Murji, and Nahaboo 2016; Moffette and Walters 2018). I discuss key insights from all three meta-reviews that inform this paper, but also note some important limitations.

Drawing from across these three meta-reviews of the literature on race and migration, there are four compelling insights worth noting that theoretically inform this paper. First, these reviews point to the diverse forms and practices of racialisation, racism and the construction of racial hierarchies (by skin colour, ethnic, religious, language or cultural difference), noting further that these usually occur through embodied markers. Second, they all note the discursive shift from problematic biological or essentialist ideas of race to also problematicconceptualisations of race as innate cultural difference, that in effect, rests not merely on incommensurability, but on neo-racist assumptions (explicit or implicit) of the inferiority of these cultural differences. Third, all three reviews emphasise intersectional approaches to race and migration as a critical mode of enquiry essential to understanding complexly layered migrant experiences. Such modes of enquiry also necessitate paying attention to the intersecting structures of relative privilege – particularly of the normativity and invisibility of ‘whiteness’. Fourth, while all three acknowledge the importance of analysing the enduring legacies of the colonial encounter and the temporal and context-specific differentiations it produces, Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou (2015) articulate this most forcefully from an explicitly decolonial perspective that is also concerned with the implications for knowledge production.

While these four insights inform the present paper, there are also two important limitations evident across these three meta-reviews that need further discussion. First, methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2003) continues to be implicit in the meta-reviews’ assumptions about the nation-state as the analytic frame. There is consequently no critique of the ways in which ‘the national form of state power as one that inherently organises human “society” as a racialized community, one in which citizenship operates to create a positively racialized nation and a negatively racialized other' (Sharma 2015, 103).

The second critical limitation of the three meta-reviews is the persistent Euro-centrism in their epistemological framing, ironically evident even in the decolonial perspective of Grosfoguel and Christou. The theoretical locus of all three sets of authors is presumptively based on the analysis of migratory movements from the global South to Europe and North America. This limited geographic scope persists despite the multi-directional nature of contemporary global mobility flows: the largest proportion of forced and voluntary movements of people occurs from the global South to neighbouring countries and regions within the global South. Further, one of the most significant global migration corridors is to countries in the Middle East. However, as I have noted, racism is rarely explicitly analysed in the scholarship on migration to the Middle East or other global South locations.

To counter the critical limitations of nation-state centric and Euro-centric perspectives in the analysis of migration, this paper proposes to draw on Sharma’s (2015 articulation of race as deeply implicated in the proprietary character of national belonging or ‘citizenship’, which legitimates the differential treatment, exclusion or even extermination of those deemed to be ‘other’. Within the nation-state frame, migrants are always already perceived as a threat to the ‘citizen subject’; they are the quintessential ‘other’, constructed as ‘out of place, as not belonging, as not having the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt 1951).

Further, this paper challenges Eurocentric biases in theoretical analyses of migration and racism by investigating the racialised production of migrant hierarchies in the kafala in countries of the Middle East. As Pailey points out in a powerful recent critique, making visible the operations of racialisation and racism across non-European, non-white context is an important strategy of ‘de-centring the white gaze’ (Pailey 2019 ). ‘De-centring the white gaze’ will be achieved in this paper by shifting the geographic locus outside Europe/America, by illuminating the ‘trace effects’ (Wolfe 2016) of colonial legacies, and importantly, by drawing on scholars from the global South who theorise systematic humiliation as a manifestation of deeply unequal societies (see essays in the volume edited by Guru 2009 ). While the work of these scholars is largely focussed on humiliation produced by the practices of untouchability within the Indian caste system, there are strong parallels that can be drawn between the caste system and the kafala. Both are differentiated hierarchies of socio-economic inequality, and both are based on the systematic, racialised humiliation of particular groups. In this paper, I draw particularly on the concept of ‘institutional humiliation’ developed by Bhikhu Parekh (2009) to illuminate the entanglements of race, gender, citizenship, and migration within the kafala. The next section elaborates the conceptual framework and evidence for the kafala as a system of racialised institutional humiliation.

The kafala as a system of racialised institutional humiliation

The systematic humiliation of some groups of people by others is endemic to social life in unequal societies: it is observable in systems of caste-based untouchability, racism, slavery, apartheid, the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, or other inequalities based on racial, ethnic, caste or religious differences. As defined by Bhikhu Parekh,

institutionalised humiliation exists when social institutions and practices embody disrespect for, and systematically violate the self-respect of, groups of individuals. An unequal society in which some enjoy considerable power over others and exercise it with relative impunity is obviously its ideal home. (Parekh 2009, 31)

Parekh notes that while inequality, discrimination, cruelty and degradation may all be constitutive elements of institutional humiliation, these are not interchangeable terms, as the sources, nature and extent of inequality are important to consider in defining humiliation.

For Parekh, institutionalised humiliation is a complex phenomenon, with four inter-related components. First, a dominant ideology that legitimates the systematic assault on the self-respect of groups of people who have been identified as inferior human beings on the basis of particular criteria such as race, ethnicity, caste, religion. Like all hegemonic ideologies, this social system is transmitted through educational, legal and cultural institutions that naturalises it as unavoidable ‘common sense’ to which there are no alternatives. The hold of this dominant ideology is most evident in the frequent internalisation of negative self-worth and acceptance of their presumed inferiority by those who are routinely subjected to disrespect and contempt. Second, humiliation requires conditions of degradation – that is, the economic and social marginalisation of the humiliated is created through practices that systematically treat such people as deserving of little, if any, respect. They are demeaned and devalued through rules and norms that constrain where they live, what spaces they may occupy, their mobility, their commensality and marriage practices, and how they interact with others. Third, an informal diffused system of coercion and sanctions is essential to the maintenance of subordination. And fourth, the coercive force of state authority is required to sustain the system. This occurs through the everyday laws, rules and political institutions that deny those humiliated by the system the basic rights and voice available to other members of that society, but also through occasional enforcement of exemplary punishment to those who are deemed to be transgressors. The next four sub-sections analyse how racialised institutional humiliation is constructed in the kafala through these four component elements.

Hegemonic ideology

Over the past century, the evolution of the kafala as a racialised, hegemonic ideology can be traced, first, to British colonial legacies in the production of the Middle East (particularly the Arabian peninsula) as an ‘imperial backwater’ (Kanna 2014, 608), and second, to the major transformations of this region with the discovery of oil on the peninsula. In line with the colonial pattern globally, the British (and French in the Levant) constructed racialised spaces and practices of exclusion of the ‘natives’ (Vitalis 2007). In the post-colonial period, these systems of privilege particularly in the oil-rich Gulf countries were expanded to include citizens of all global North countries. Kanna’s insightful ethnography of ‘Western expatriate’ enjoyment of affordable consumer well-being in privileged spatial enclaves (resorts, private clubs and gated communities) demonstrates that ‘the production of Dubai as a refuge for European expatriates was largely the co-production or joint enterprise of British and local Arab elites' (2014, 612).

Positioned at the upper end of the kafala hierarchy are expatriates (‘expats’) from OECD countries – usually ‘white’/Anglo European, American or Australians, who have been enticed to work for lucrative, tax-free salaries in global companies and in the education sector. The residence and employment of these ‘expats’ is also contingent on sponsorship by a citizen kafeel, however, they are relatively privileged migrants, hired for the symbolic superiority denoted by their ‘whiteness’ (Vora and Koch 2015; Kanna 2014). Indeed, their status is indicated by the use of the label ‘expat’ rather than ‘migrant’ as an identifier. A deeper understanding of the persistent (though invisible) ideological normativity of ‘whiteness’ in such context requires recognition of ‘colonial mentality, a term which refers to the conscious and subconscious mimicry of behavioural and cultural standards established by European colonisers, European expatriates and other perceived agents of Euro-American modernity' (Ochonu 2019, 11). ‘Colonial mentality’ thus is an unrecognised legacy of the imperial period in the Middle East that has permeated the structure of the kafala, positioning ‘whiteness’ at the privileged top of this racialised hierarchy. As I have argued above, this racialised hierarchy is first, inflected by class, gender and citizenship status, and second, is not unique to the kafala, as it can be observed in countries of the global North.

The profound transformation of the Arabian peninsula under the impact of the oil economy also critically shaped the evolution of the kafala. Initially in 1960s and 1970s, the expansion of employment opportunities in the oil-rich states of the Middle East attracted a migrant labour force from other poorer Arab and Muslim nations such as Egypt, Yemen, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and Morocco. However, processes of consolidation of the nation-state in the oil-rich labour importing countries around distinctive ‘national’ identities necessitated the expulsion of many of these migrants, in order to preclude their claims on the nation due to shared ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ identities (Fargues 2011; Thiollet 2019). The few migrants who remained were absorbed into the middle tiers of the kafala hierarchy as professional and semi-professional workers who fulfil clerical, retail, medical, educational and other technological needs in the economy. From the 1980s, the majority of the migrant Arab labour force was replaced with workers from Asia and Africa, who even if they were often Muslim, were perceived as distant strangers who could not make citizenship claims on the nation, and could be ‘kept in their place’ as non-nationals. Thus, at the bottom end of the kafala hierarchy, we find migrant labourers from Asia and Africa working in ‘4-D’ jobs, primarily as construction workers and domestic workers.

For citizens, the underlying ideology of control and subordination is completely naturalised as necessary to manage large populations of migrants, as there is deep political and social anxiety particularly in the Gulf countries where migrants outnumber citizens in the total population. Ironically, in practice, this ‘hegemonic ideology’ of control is also often enforced by non-citizen kafeels responsible for the recruitment and governance of migrant workers, who thus effectively reinforce the citizen/non-citizen divide (Vora 2013, 113). In defence of citizens’ support of the kafala, Malaeb (2015) observes that these attitudes are perceived as ‘common sense’ for multiple reasons: the kafala is viewed as an ordinary procedural system of migrant governance, kafeels invest in the recruitment, training and education of migrants and are therefore entitled to protect their investment, and finally, that migrants are a potential source of threat to Arab cultural values. Further, as she points out, international critiques of the abuses perpetrated under the kafala are dismissed as biased and politically motivated. These arguments are the ideological justification for not only the naturalisation of the quotidian control of migrant lives, but also the barriers to their acquisition of permanent residence or citizenship in these countries, even to the children of second, third and fourth generation migrants.

Citizenship is strictly jus sanguinis (by blood or descent), there are almost no pathways for non-nationals to secure citizenship. Even migrants who have lived for over three decades in these countries and the children born to migrants have no possibility of securing citizenship, even if, as in the case of the children, the country may be the only one they have ever known as ‘home’ (Vora 2013). The construction of ‘national’ identity has meant that opposition to the acquisition of jus soli citizenship extends even to people of ‘Afro-Arab’ descent (BTS Anonymous 2018), as well as towards white/Caucasian ‘expats’ at the top of the kafala hierarchy. We see therefore that beyond political-economy analyses of the kafala as a rentier system supporting an ethnocracy, it can also be viewed as racialised occupational and class-based stratification of migrant workers in the Middle East that is contingent on citizenship, and legitimated by a hegemonic ideology.

Degradation

Degradation occurs in systems of institutionalised humiliation when life conditions are structured to keep humiliated groups in abjection, enforcing poverty, poor health and working conditions, political and social marginalisation (Parekh 2009, 33). People subjected to degrading conditions are deprived of opportunities to challenge the social and political structures that forcibly instil their socially inferior status. Degradation can therefore be viewed as encompassing economic, political, social and moral forms of subjugation.

The rules and norms of the kafala define even the most basic terms of migrant existence in the country. The lower down the kafala hierarchy a migrant is, the poorer their working conditions, and the more constrained they are regarding their mobility within the country, living conditions, and their ability to marry and have a family life. Here too, it is important to avoid exceptionalising the Middle East, and note that such conditions and constraints are similar to those experienced by black and brown migrant workers incorporated at the bottom of the racialised hierarchies in Europe, North America and Oceania.

For multiple reasons, migrant domestic workers are the most vulnerable and are most likely to experience degradation within the kafala; I illustrate below the ways in which many of these women experienced forms of degradation and institutionalised racism. The foremost and most compelling instance of degradation is the experience of physical, sexual, mental and verbal abuse that many women report. Some narratives of abuse include forms of extreme torture – burning, electrocution, severe beating and maiming, usually perpetrated by their employers. Although such abuse is well-documented throughout the Middle East (Jureidini 2003; Human Rights Watch 2004, 2010) it is typically analysed in terms of labour exploitation, and rarely in terms of race. Here I argue that these workers can be subjected to exploitation and inhumane treatment because of the racialised ‘othering’ of Asian and African migrants, and the assumed disposability of black and brown bodies.

For migrant domestic workers, this disposability has meant a rising body count over the past two decades, with no accurate estimates available, but alarmingly frequent reportage of women who have been murdered by employers, committed suicide, or died of illness, accidents or in suspicious ways. The death of the migrant domestic worker is the terminally extreme consequence of the inhumane treatment many migrant workers experience. The unnaturally high death rate relative to the young demographic of migrant domestic workers draws the attention of human rights organisations, however, it continues due to the impunity of perpetrators from prosecution for murder and abuse.

Even if they do not suffer abuse, migrant workers experience degradation through exploitation and poor working conditions. Since migrant domestic workers’ contracts specify co-residence in the homes of their employers, there is no separation of their workplace from their residence; they often do not have a room of their own and are forced to sleep in balconies, passageways, living rooms, or the children’s rooms. Their time is also not their own, as there is often no clear demarcation between work and leisure time, the implication is that their labour is ‘on-call' 24/7. Many are over-worked to the point of physical and mental collapse.

Less extreme but still pernicious forms of racism are also evident in the Middle East. There is a racialised hierarchy of wages and working conditions, in which migrant domestic workers wages are ranked by race and nationality, with Filipina women commanding the highest wages, followed by Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Nepali and finally Ethiopian and other African women. Beyond wages, however, in households that employed more than one worker, Ethiopian women are more likely to be given more physically taxing work in a household, while Filipino and Indonesian women might be given childcare work (Fernandez 2020).

Experiences of everyday racialised degradation in the household of employers were narrated by Ethiopian women, who described the insults and disparaging comments by employers, who would call them ‘asuad’ (‘black’), or insult them by referring to them or their country as ‘poor’ and ‘uncivilised’. Some women recounted how employers would shun physical contact with them, forcing them to use a separate set of dishes: ‘They treat Habeshas [Ethiopians] as dirty … They don’t even see them as good enough to touch' (Fernandez 2020).

Women also observed that employers would provide them with poorer quality and inadequate food and accommodation. Domestic workers were usually expected to eat separately, in the kitchen, or in their rooms, if they had one. Although the domestic worker contract stipulates that they should be provided with a separate room, several women recounted being forced to sleep in the kitchen, passageways, verandahs, or in children’s rooms.

Racial and sexual degradation permeated their experiences in the public sphere too. Women were vulnerable to insults from strangers, and particularly, to sexual harassment by men. Women’s safety and mobility is impacted by taxi drivers who refuse to take them to their destinations, overcharge them, or insult them. These men often sexually harass women, assuming they are sexually available. Women experience racial and sexual degradation in other public arenas such as shops, when sales people would monitor their presence or insultingly dismiss their capacity to buy. As I have shown elsewhere, migrant women in Lebanon also often experienced differential treatment in health care services (Fernandez 2018), or when they attempted to access childcare and education for their children (Fernandez 2017).

Diffused system of coercion

The institutional durability of the kafala is achieved through the state’s dispersal of coercion and surveillance over migrants to kafeels. The institution thus relies on individuals in society to ‘act as the guardians of the system, and authorises them to administer chastisement, dismiss from jobs, ostracise, insult, and use such sanctions and coercive measures as they think appropriate to keep the subordinate groups in their place' (Parekh 2009, 33). By making individual kafeels responsible for the management, welfare and disciplining of this large population of migrants, the system simultaneously ensures effective mechanisms of control while absolving the state of responsibility for such control. It is worth noting that the ‘rise of a supervised society, and with it an alternate track of citizenship’ (Miller and Alexander 2015, 291) are signature technologies of racialised, carceral citizenship in the US and other parts of the world, and not unique to the Middle East.

Legally, kafeels are responsible for the iqama and work permits of every person they sponsor. Failure to renew these permits forces the migrant into illegal status, but also, makes the kafeel liable for fines. The kafeel is held responsible if the migrant ‘runs away’, and usually becomes liable for the cost of deporting the migrant when they are apprehended. Kafeels will therefore deploy a range of coercive mechanisms of control to prevent migrants from ‘running away’. Kafeels confiscate the passport, residence and work permits of migrant employees upon arrival – a practice that is technically illegal, but nevertheless standard, as they have little or no fear of sanctions from the state. Some kafeels will also constrain the mobility of their migrant employees, locking them within the house (in the case of domestic workers) or within labour camp sites (particularly construction workers). The use and/or the threat of physical, verbal and sexual violence is also a coercive mechanism of control deployed by kafeels to secure compliance and subordination.

Despite the coercive mechanisms of control exerted by kafeels, migrant workers do frequently run away from their employers, to escape abusive or exploitative conditions, or simply to seek better employment. As I have noted elsewhere, this threat of ‘exit’ indicates a fundamental instability in the coercive structure of the relationship between employees and kafeels (Fernandez 2014). When women ‘run away’, they exit their formal employment contracts and take up irregular, freelance work, gaining greater personal mobility, autonomy and higher incomes. However, within the kafala, ‘running away’ automatically renders their residential status irregular, as their passports and iqamas inevitably remain with the kafeel. In becoming irregularised, they are vulnerable to apprehension by the police, detention, fines and deportation. The time women spend in the detention centre varies and is contingent on the number of cases waiting to be processed, the woman’s capacity to pay the accumulated fines, and, importantly, on the willingness of the kafeel to release her. As the kafeel is liable for paying the migrant worker’s return airfare home, they either negotiate with the woman that she should cover her own ticket or, in some instances, they concoct a false criminal charge of theft in order to avoid liability.

We see therefore that the diffused system of coercion set up through the kafala operates to control both regular contracted migrants, and irregularised migrants. It is critically important to note that the disciplinary pressure of the kafala is distinctly racialised, as the mechanisms of coercion to ensure structural subordination are reserved for Asian and African migrant workers, and are not deployed on the privileged, usually Caucasian ‘expats’ employed at the upper end of the kafala hierarchy.

State enforcement

Systems of institutionalised humiliation require state enforcement; although much of the work of subordination is achieved through the dispersal of coercion, the enforcement of state laws, policies and regulations is critical to the operation and legitimacy of the system (Parekh 2009). In the case of the kafala, I argue that in addition to the state regulations that constrain migrants’ residence and employment status discussed previously, the absence of state enforcement is as important as its excessive presence; I review each of these below.

The absence of state enforcement is evident in the absence and/or non-enforcement of labour law protections for migrant workers, and the non-enforcement of protections against abuse. Although by law all migrant workers are supposed to be provided with employment contracts, in practice, there is sometimes a large gap between the terms of the contract and the actual employment experience of migrants. Well documented, typical breaches include the non-payment or underpayment of wages, excessive work, physical, sexual and/or verbal abuse, unsafe work and inadequate living conditions. In such instances, migrant workers’ recourse to legally challenging such violations are limited by the lack of state support, the costs and the language barriers of engaging in litigation. Even when cases of egregious abuse of migrant workers are taken to the courts (often with the support of human rights organisations), there is rarely any legal prosecution and/or punishment of the perpetrators, and little or no compensation for the migrant workers who do seek such recourse.

Another important exclusion that prevents migrant workers from collectively mobilising for the enforcement of state protections is the prohibition of migrant workers from organising trade unions and from political rights. While such rights are limited even for citizens of these countries, non-citizens are more definitively excluded. This exclusion can be attributed in part to the deliberately racialised ‘anti-integration’ polices of these states that substituted Arab migrant workers (who potentially had claims to citizenship) with Asian and African non-nationals as the latter could be disenfranchised and excluded from participation in political life and from access to social services, rights and the benefits of citizenship.

Crucially, for migrant domestic workers, the state’s absence is even more evident, as they are legally excluded from the labour laws that apply to other migrant and citizen workers (Kerbage and Essim 2011). This exclusion from labour laws is due in large part to the strong cultural value placed on the sacrosanct privacy of the home; since it is considered culturally unacceptable for homes to be subject to official inspection as workplaces, domestic workers are typically excluded from the entitlements and protections of labour law (Varia 2011). International censure of these exclusions over the past decades has led a number of governments in the Middle East to acknowledge the importance of adopting the ILO Domestic Workers Convention No. 189 of 2011 and enact national laws for better protection of migrant domestic workers, however, there has been little or no real progress towards this goal.

In tandem with the absence of state protections for migrants is what I label the excessive presence of the state in controlling migrant workers and in punishing them for transgressions. This form of state enforcement occurs through ‘periodic displays of strength, showcase trials, and exemplary punishment of carefully selected and dramatised cases of transgression' (Parekh 2009, 33–34). The excessive presence of the state is keenly felt by irregularised migrant workers, through the constant threat of detention and deportation.

Many states periodically enact mass deportations of irregularised migrant workers, which serves as display of strength, but also as a regulatory mechanism to economically and politically control the supply of this large pool of easily exploitable ‘cheap’ labour. For instance, one of the largest deportation of workers with irregular status occurred between November 2013 and February 2014, when Saudi Arabia deported over 160,000 Ethiopians.

The most extreme instance of excessive presence of the state is in the application of the death penalty for migrant transgressions in Saudi Arabia, which has retentionist laws on capital punishment. Reports by Amnesty International showed that a substantial proportion of executions reported in Saudi Arabia were of non-nationals; they comprised 57.7% in 2000 and 41.6% in both 2001 and 2002 (as cited in Human Rights Watch 2004, 108). The representative governments and family members of the executed are often not informed prior to execution. One of the most publicised cases was of Tuti Tursilawati, an Indonesian migrant domestic worker who was executed in 2018 for murdering her employer. The execution order ignored her claim that she was acting in self-defence because she was being sexually abused (Renaldi 2018).

While executions and deportations are exceptional events signalling the state’s excessive presence, it is worth noting that here too, enforcement is racialised, as it is predominantly the bodies of black and brown migrants that are produced as disposable in these ways. The extreme punitive enforcement of the state’s prerogative to expel and exterminate unwanted migrants thus serves to enforce the kafala as a racialised system of institutional humiliation.

Conclusion

In making visible the ‘“absent presence” of race' (Pailey 2019 , 730), the preceding analysis of the kafala demonstrates that an implicit or explicit assumption of racialised hierarchies of difference is foundational to the economic and political structure of the system; I turn now to discuss the implications. Recalling Wolfe’s (2016) insight that globally, the production of racialised distinctions reflect different, site-specific histories and forms of capitalist economic expropriation, I argue that the racialised hierarchies of difference in the kafala sustain and expand the possibilities of capitalist accumulation through a system of institutional humiliation that expropriates migrant labour. This economic expropriation operates at two levels – directly, through a range of exploitative practices of withholding pay, underpayment and/or overwork of individual migrant workers. More indirectly, expropriation occurs at the national level, where the state shuns responsibility for the social reproduction of the migrant labour force – depleted migrant workers are simply returned to their origin countries, as there is an almost inexhaustible supply of replaceable migrant workers (particularly for ‘4-D’ labour) from a range of Asian and African source countries. Bans on migration issued by migrant source countries in response to incidents of abuse and exploitation are of little consequence, as there is always a new, poorer source country willing to export migrant labour. The expropriation of labour is not only racialised, it is also gendered, as the specific labour of migrant domestic workers is viewed as part of an ‘unspoken bargain' or social compact in which the state guarantees a leisured lifestyle to its citizens (Sabban 2002) and facilitates a privatised, low-cost alternative to state provisioning of care (Fernandez 2011).

The deliberate architecture of racialised exclusion on the basis of citizenship is also foundational to the political structure of the state. Following Sharma’s argument (2015) that the production of ‘citizens’ in these countries is predicated on the construction of negatively racialised migrant ‘others’, I argue that political anxieties about the economically essential but high ratios of migrants to nationals have hardened the boundaries between citizen and migrant in these contexts. There are almost no legal pathways to citizenship and long-term settlement of migrants within countries in the Middle East. Further, as I have discussed above, migrant workers are excluded from the rights (even if limited) accorded to citizens, such as the rights to organise. Here too, the exclusions are gendered, as migrant domestic workers in particular are excluded from labour rights entirely. The abrogation of rights is also evident in the frequent violation of the human rights of migrant workers, as documented in reports of egregious abuse, even unto death. Institutionalised sanction of such abuse is indicated by the fact that there is little or no legal recourse available to migrant workers, and perpetrators are allowed to escape with impunity. While such violations are often explained psychologically as the pathologies of individual employers (Malaeb 2015), such explanations individualise and exceptionalise the occurrence, obscuring from view the institutional operation of the kafala that permits them (Pande 2013), and the broader structures of racialised capitalism within which they occur.

The application of the analytic lens of institutional humiliation further illuminates the operation of the kafala as a racially stratified occupational hierarchy that is differentiated by gender, class and citizenship status. This lens makes visible the normative privilege that continues to be accorded to ‘whiteness’, even in a non-European, non-white context. ‘Whiteness’ and citizenship of global North countries produces exceptional migrant status, with privileges that are almost equivalent to those of citizens. Such privileges are naturalised through hegemonic ideologies and social and cultural practices, and are in distinct contrast to the degradation of migrant workers at the lower end of the occupational hierarchy. Degradation and inferiorisation are marked and embodied through practices of spatial and social segregation, both in private and public. Migrant workers at the lower end of the hierarchy, are subjected to degradation through the often demeaning, discriminating and abusive attitudes of nationals and often also, of non-citizen kafeels towards them. The ultimate marker of their degradation is their disposability: through untimely death, or deportation.

By way of conclusion, there are two reflections I would like to offer. First, I would like to briefly consider the question of how a structure of institutional humiliation such as the kafala could potentially be dismantled. In response to international censure, a few governments have made political declarations that the kafala would be reformed or abolished, however, there has been little or no progress towards any significant change. Resistance to reforms arises from concerns related to increased costs, loss of income by businesses and perceived security threats (Varia 2011). Indeed, legal proclamations alone are highly unlikely to effect change, if we accept Parekh’s argument that the dismantling of institutional humiliation requires an assault on all four inter-related components that sustain such systems – hegemonic ideologies, degradation, diffused coercion and state enforcement. It is worth noting here however, that the instability of the kafala lies in the capacity of migrant workers who are subjected to humiliation to resist internalising or accepting their presumed inferiority. This is not simply to say that they can gloss over the humiliating aspects of their experience as migrant workers in how they present their lives to their families at home (Gardner 2010), or that they can employ the ‘weapons of the weak’ (Moukarbel 2009; Fernandez 2014), but additionally, to argue that they do have an exit option, to leave and return to their own countries. This exit option would, at least to an extent, ameliorate the extent to which the experiences of routine humiliation are internalised as negative self-worth by migrant workers.

Second, I argue that while the kafala is unique to the Middle East, it is not exceptional: similar racialised systems of institutional humiliation of migrants exist in countries of the global North. In making this argument, I depart from Parekh’s (2009) claim that institutional humiliation is weak or even absent in modern liberal bourgeois societies, despite the presence of deep inequalities. According to Parekh, in liberal democracies citizenship offers a presumptive basis for political and legal equality; a greater degree of vertical mobility is possible; and welfare provisioning ensures that no individual or group of people has endured humiliation in order to survive. However, as this paper demonstrates, these assertions about liberal societies are largely irrelevant in the Middle East, but, importantly I also argue, they can be called into question even in Europe/North America. Such questioning would consider the racial faultlines of the constitution of citizenship, as well as the deliberate dismantling of welfare states in global North countries, which has rendered racialised groups persistently ‘second-class’ citizens. The assertion that institutional humiliation is absent in such contexts is untenable when we consider the ways in which the spectacle of migrant ‘othering’ and violence towards migrants (De Genova 2018) is increasingly produced alongside the deepening of illiberal migration governance in ostensibly ‘liberal’ societies (Thiollet 2019). Forms of racialised institutional humiliation through stratified occupational hierarchies have also been constructed for migrants to these societies. And although the pathways to citizenship are not completely closed, they are increasingly restricted in these contexts, and those who are excluded do not share access to normative privileges assumed to be conferred through membership as citizens of the polity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DECRA DE150100443].