Will the Arab Spring Leave Migrants Out in the Cold?
The uprisings of the “Arab Spring” have been by turns inspiring, frustrating and tragic for activists around the globe. And they are still horribly incomplete—not just because the emerging revolutions have been in many cases squelched by authoritarian regimes, but because the movements for freedom and justice have left out whole swaths of the affected populations. While citizens push for their rights and have broken into the foreground of the Western media, the throngs of migrants who fuel the regional economy continue to face their own struggles against abuse and impunity, mostly ignored inside and outside their adopted communities.
Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia executed eight Bangaldeshi migrant workers, convicted of killing of an Egyptian man. After the public beheadings, advocates globally denounced the trial (reportedly based on a violent workplace dispute in 2007) as a sham. Executions are up sharply in Saudi Arabia this year, reports Amnesty International, and 20 of the roughly 58 have involved immigrants.
An Indonesian maid met a similar fate in June, as did a Sudanese man last month (on allegations of witchcraft). The reports suggest that state violence against migrants shares the cruel mechanics of much more public government crackdowns on street demonstrations.
Calling for a moratorium on executions in Saudi Arabia, Amnesty notes that aside from the general barbarity of the practice, migrant defendants have no access to legal counsel or language translation, and “In many cases they are not informed of the progress of legal proceedings against them.”
So is the push for more democratic government in the Arab world going to change the plight of migrants, who in many ways have even fewer rights than citizens?
The criminal punishment of migrants is just one aspect of the degradation of foreign workers. Indonesian authorities just announced plans to repatriate several thousand migrant and undocumented workers deemed to be troublemakers by the Saudi government—that is, men and women “who ran away from their employers after being unpaid or suffering abuse,” according to the Jakarta Post.
Human Rights Watch researcher Christoph Wilcke describes the ugly convergence of internal discrimination and international neglect in Jordan:
These women provide valuable domestic services that are in high demand. Yet they remain excluded from labor laws that provide basic protections—as basic as a weekly day of rest. And they are subject to an immigration sponsorship system that makes it difficult to escape abusive employers—escapes that the authorities sometimes treat as a crime.
Take the case of Marjorie L., a Filipina woman, whose employer made her work long hours for no pay and locked her inside the house before “loaning” Marjorie against her will to a friend across town for several months. She was not paid there either. She eventually escaped, but then faced detention by the authorities and was unable to return home.
While this system of coercive labor and outright slavery may have cultural underpinnings, it is no doubt reinforced by the perverse incentives of global capitalism and the asymmetries between political progress and economic “development.” Hence migrant issues seem even more acute in relatively “stable” countries like Jordan, where activism has been subdued amid promises of economic growth for some.