Persian Gulf:
Immigrant Workers Become Victims

Mar 30, 2026

This article is translated from the March 27 issue, #3008 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

The working class in most countries around the Persian Gulf is mainly composed of immigrant workers. When the war began, they were trapped without resources in unexpectedly dangerous places.

In the six Gulf monarchies of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, more than half of the 60 million inhabitants are foreign workers. In Qatar, they make up nearly 90% of the population. Around 25 million workers are from Asia, especially India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Several hundred thousand are from Africa.

Oil and gas workers, construction workers, hotel employees, domestic workers, and drivers, they are indispensable in all essential sectors. They are subjected to brutal exploitation. Several Gulf countries practice the “kafala” system which requires workers to have a sponsor such as their employer who controls their right to keep a job, change jobs, or leave the country. Sponsors often confiscate their passports, which puts them in a position of almost total dependence.

The war drastically worsened this situation. Tourism collapsed. A number of energy and petrochemical sites have been damaged by bombs. Others were closed in fear of bombs. Affluent Western families and foreign executives fled in haste, sometimes abandoning their employees. Domestic workers, chauffeurs, and guards found themselves without pay or housing in the blink of an eye.

All this causes drastic consequences in their countries of origin. In India’s southern state of Kerala, remittances sent by workers in the Middle East make up a fifth of local incomes. Workers from Bangladesh alone sent more than 23 billion dollars home last year. These transfers support entire families, who are now bearing the brunt of the war’s consequences.

The governments of their countries of origin have little to offer. The government of the Philippines says it is willing to bring back the 2.4 million Filipino workers in the Middle East if the situation worsens. But leaders did not say how they would do this. A video filmed in Bahrain showing Filipino workers being roughly turned away by an embassy staffer has caused outrage. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi bizarrely boasts of having called several leaders of Persian Gulf countries to thank them for taking care of Indians there.

During peacetime, the Persian Gulf monarchies’ skyscrapers and energy and tourism industries relied on the exploitation of these tens of millions of workers. In wartime, these same workers and their families thousands of miles away suffer immediate consequences.