The kafala or sponsorship system has been one of the pillars of the migration policies in all the Gulf countries: tying foreign workers to their employers, necessarily citizens of the country, it made the former's residence entirely dependent on the will of the latter. In 2009, Bahrain was the first GCC country to discard the kafil sponsorship system by setting up a government agency to issue work permits to foreigners. Following in its steps, the Kuwait minister of Labour announced in October 2010 that the emirate will cancel the kafala by February 2011 as a gesture of good will towards the foreign workers to mark the anniversaries of Kuwait's independence, her liberation from the Iraqi invasion and the fifth year in power of the present ruler, Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah. While the reform in Bahrain is strongly criticised, by economists and politicians alike, for making little difference with the sponsorship system, the Kuwaiti authorities simply went back on their words and the promise of a radical 'gift' to expatriates was replaced by proclaimed intentions to amend the system. In a nutshell, results are far from living up to the expectations. Whose expectations? Through the analysis of the Bahraini experiment and the debate launched in Kuwait following the government's contradictory announcements, this paper proposes to disentangle the various actors, external and internal, in favour of and opposing a reform of the kafala and expose the economic, political or ethic arguments underpinning their respective positions. It will also seek to identify first the determinant factors that led Bahrain to adopt a policy change while Kuwait gave it up, and second the main obstacles, particularly the structural ones, that lie in the way of implementing such a drastic reform. The paper's contention is that cancelling the kafala system may prove far lengthier a process than what a simple alignment to international standards would have predicted, because the sponsorship shaped both the economy and society of the GCC countries. To support this conclusion, the paper will mostly use the findings of qualitative interviews with the main stake holders of the issue in both Bahrain and Kuwait. In that regard, the pair of case studies is particularly illuminating due to the very different economic paths that he two countries have taken since the establishment of their similar migration policies, with Bahrain having actually entered a post-rentier economic phase, while Kuwait is obviously not quite there.