On the outskirts of Doha, there is a district known as “Asian City,” a sprawl of worker barracks, shops, and restaurants that advertises itself as having “24/7 Security & CCTV Surveillance” and an on-site “Police Facility.” It sits less than 20 minutes from a deportation detention center where migrant workers are held when they are in abrogation of labor contracts with their employers. I have been struck by the facility’s resemblance to the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, California, where I have represented detained immigrant workers, as well as to the other warehouses currently being purchased by ICE around the country to detain immigrants.
I worry that the condition of rightlessness, of the bare life of dislocated workers, is deepening, both for transnational migrants and for those dislocated from villages to cities within national borders. The kafala system structuring labor and migration policy in the GCC+ countries—Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and the member-states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—is often portrayed in the liberal imagination as exceptional, in no small part due to rampant Islamophobia. I do not wish to make—or even endorse—that reflexive move in this writing. I use kafala here toward a different purpose, as a snapshot of legal architecture that facilitates the domination and control of marginalized workers. As we work to oppose immigration enforcement, understanding transnational continuities can help us think structurally about the potential transformation of the U.S. immigration system.
The Kafala System
As of 2020, there were 36 million migrant workers in the GCC+ countries. Migrant workers comprised, on average, 70 percent of the employed population of GCC countries, while making up 95 percent of private sector workers in Qatar and the UAE. These migrant workers are generally part of the kafala system, in which their residency and employment status are tied to a specific employer throughout their period of residence in the country. Because the system renders workers almost entirely dependent on the goodwill of their employer, it creates conditions that are predictably ripe for exploitation and abuse. Indeed, to the extent that most in the U.S. are aware of the system, it is due to the exploitation and death of migrant workers from Asia and Africa during the building of World Cup stadiums in Qatar.
While the system has been formally renounced by governments—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel have disavowed kafala in recent years—and workforce nationalization efforts have gained momentum, labor markets in the region continue to rely on the collusive coercive capacity of employers and the state. In Israel, for example, 46 Thai agricultural workers were killed and 31 workers were kidnapped on October 7, 2023. There were approximately 30,000 Thai agricultural workers in Israel on that day, the largest group of migrant workers in the country, recruited to replace internally displaced Palestinian workers after the first intifada in the early 1990s. Other governments in the region have replaced Palestinian and Egyptian workers with Asians and Africans for a much longer duration, in part to suppress pan-Arab political and labor activism against the oligarchical ruling families.
Scholars of labor practices in the region take pains to argue that the kafala system is not an innate condition unique to the cultures of the GCC+ states but is instead a set of practices and policies that were developed by British colonial officials in collusion with large employers in the early twentieth century. This system was adapted over time by ruling classes in nation-states, working in conjunction with the large multinational oil companies that came to dominate the regional economy in the 1960s and 1970s. As Alex Boodrookas has observed, “inequity in the Gulf…is intimately and historically entangled within a global system of economic inequality and white supremacy.”
Migrant workers in kafala systems are subject to a range of conditions—undergirded by law on the books in some cases, by legal silence and underenforcement in others—that leave them particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Often recruited through official transnational pipelines, recruitment fees and travel costs are frequently passed down to workers by employers and agencies, leaving the workers in debt bondage. Once in the country, states typically delegate authority over immigration status to private employers, who can unilaterally alter contract terms and restrict workers’ physical mobility and job mobility. Sometimes, employers engage in visa trading by selling their labor contracts to other employers in an informal market, a process that facilitates worsening conditions as the worker is passed from employer to employer.
Because employers possess the power to expel workers from the country, workers are deterred from demanding fair living and working conditions. They are often housed in congested “dorms,” without access to healthcare, and subject to deceptive contracts, irregular pay, and wage theft, with little or no access to state-based dispute resolution mechanisms. To the extent that workers make demands, attempt to change jobs, or try to leave the country, their employer will report them for “absconding,” which triggers arrest, detention, fines, and deportation. Authority over these arrangements is often concentrated in a centralized ministry of the interior, which also houses growing systems of policing, surveillance, and detention aimed at both migrants and citizens demanding rights.
Employers also exploit racial and gender difference by forcing darker-skinned and femme workers into low-wage occupational tiers without regard for education or experience. Racialization and misogyny fracture potential alliances between migrants and natives, particularly when used against nascent campaigns for freedom of association and collective bargaining. Subordinated migrant workers form an underclass that undergirds multi-tiered systems of citizenship, in which privileges are determined by proximity to ruling-class power. In Qatar, for example, those who trace their family lineage in the country before 1930 have more rights than “naturalized” citizens who came after. The state gives those in lower tiers of citizenship access to public employment and social welfare benefits from its fossil fuel wealth, as well as the cheap labor of migrant workers.
Convergent Migration Regimes
When seen through the prism of the kafala system, it appears that the Trump administration seeks to consolidate and formalize extractive features of the U.S. migration regime through its many policy and legal initiatives.
Consider, for instance, the administration’s recent effort to cut wages in the H-2A visa program for seasonal or temporary agricultural labor. The administration significantly lowered the state-specific minimum wage and eliminated mandatory housing and transportation for seasonal farmworkers. While a federal court stopped the administration from permanently lowering wages without further process, Trump appears to be responding to pressure from growers in a tightening labor market shaped by his aggressive enforcement initiatives against undocumented workers. In fact, the H-2A program has grown markedly under both Republican and Democratic administrations, from 50,000 workers receiving temporary visas in 2005 to 400,000 workers in 2025. The Trump administration would like to make it cheaper to use those workers.
The administration has also attempted to functionally eliminate several categories of legal immigration status. The enforcement initiatives against refugee populations in the U.S., such as the Somali community in Minneapolis and the Haitian community in Ohio, come despite their legal status in the U.S. The cancellation of Temporary Protected Status for those fleeing natural disasters, backed by the U.S. Supreme Court, has occurred despite statutory authority and compliance. Thousands of student visas have also been canceled, making U.S. universities inaccessible to international students from many countries of origin.
If the administration’s goal is to reduce the number of immigrants in the country, these initiatives are somewhat counter-intuitive, as the targeted communities are not the most vulnerable migrants lacking legal status, while many undocumented people continue to labor in fields and meatpacking plants in red states across the country. The goal of these efforts, then, should not be seen as attempting to limit immigration entirely. Rather, they are efforts to render migrants more vulnerable. The attack on student visa holders, for instance, can be understood as an effort to prevent the expansion and stabilization of a class of educated migrants with access to higher-wage jobs. In other cases, the attack represents an effort to prevent admission with paths to legal status or to eliminate the contingent, pre-citizen statuses that have been granted by the state. These efforts, which overwhelmingly focus on black and brown migrants, lead to deportation, sometimes in contravention of law, and expand the migrant precariat.
The Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate birthright citizenshipand threats to denaturalize citizens also fit with this pattern. If children born in the U.S. are rendered stateless, they join the precariat at birth. A low ceiling stops the upward trajectory of migrant families towards political, social, and economic rights. Threats to denaturalize, meanwhile, are deployed to discipline potentially unruly citizens—indeed, this mere threat creates second-class citizenship, analogous to the tiers of citizenship in the GCC+ countries. It creates a vulnerability and dependence on the ruling-class via employers and other agents of authority in towns and cities.
When it comes to policing, surveillance, detention, and deportation, the Trump administration has made a concerted effort to centralize authority within the Department of Homeland Security. Indeed, DHS looks more like a GCC+ ministry of interior than it does the preexisting Immigration and Naturalization Service within the Department of Justice. In Democratic administrations, migrants and their advocates have used some remaining decentralized authority to mobilize federal agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, and an independent DOJ to check the enforcement imperatives of DHS. They have also used federalism to gain protections at the state and local levels from federal enforcement authority. In the face of these strategies, the Trump administration has created a juggernaut federal agency with a core mission to terrorize and subordinate migrants and their allies.
The Trump administration’s focus on immigration enforcement and its elimination of channels of legal migration build on policies and practices implemented by successive administrations since 1996. In response, immigrant advocates have too often operated within the blinkered limits of a liberal nationalist imaginary, hence the multiple failed “comprehensive immigration reform” proposals that combine earned citizenship schemes with hardened borders and expanded enforcement capacity in the interior. The growth of the migration regulation apparatus has been markedly asymmetric, as millions of migrants have been left vulnerable to mass deportation. Kafala demonstrates that it is possible for the state to structure a system in which migrants contribute their labor for a pittance and never gain political, social, and economic rights in the country in which they work. As Charisse Burden-Stelly points out, the U.S. has intimate experience with regimes of migration and labor that extract value from Black workers while minimizing their worth. Awareness of this substrate is essential for contemporary abolitionist imperatives on the center-left in the U.S. The surfacing of these present/future conditions opens space for deeper contestation, outside of the confines of a liberal nationalism that is both paralytic and necrotic.
