This paper examines the policy regimes that regulate Ethiopian women’s migration as domestic workers to Kuwait and Lebanon, focusing on the role of the facilitators of this movement. The paper draws on multi-sited empirical research in Ethiopia, Lebanon and Kuwait, and analyses how national and international policies produce two oppositional categories of illegal brokers or traffickers on the one hand and employment agents on the other hand. The paper discusses how despite the policy distinction between these two categories, there are blurred boundaries between them in their recruitment operations, as they often collaborate and manoeuvre around laws and regulations. This paper argues that the persistence of illegal brokers and traffickers notwithstanding the efforts to regulate their operations does not simply indicate the need for more or better regulation (as is often suggested). Rather, it calls for recognition of how the policies – and importantly, the non-policies – frame both the legal and illegal trade in migrant workers as a highly lucrative entrepreneurial activity. A comparative analysis of policy approaches to regulating the trade in migrants in Lebanon and Kuwait reflects divergent underlying views of the role of migrant domestic workers in the national economy.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the ambivalence of public private partnerships in Migration policy making and to re-assess the role of the sponsorship system in the management of migrants and their families. We analyze the relationship between the state and private actors (firms, recruitment agencies, chambers of commerce, various brokers and sponsors) which was constructed partly through a joint management of labour migration fluxes. From the 1960s to the 1990s, migration management was negotiated between state administrations, firms and recruitment agencies, overlooked by Chambers of commerce. Early “migration policy” were first managed by the US-owned ARAMCO and the Saudi state, linking private, national and foreign interests. After the nationalization of the ARAMCO, the public /private partnership remained the key scheme of migration management in a shifting institutional environment. The sponsorship system known as kafâla embodied the importance of private actors in migration management: the State externalises the control over foreign workers to their employer or their recruiter and immigrants are tied to Saudi counterparts who are their legal sponsors (kâfil, plur: kufala’). Far from being a public instrument of control over immigration trends and immigrants’ residence, the sponsorship system can be seen as a system of brokerage that institutionalized a delegation of State prerogatives to civil society. In the early 1990, “Saudisation policies” led to “bring the state back” in migration management. They were designed to promote the indigenization of the labour force and lower the share of immigrant labour in the economy. Symbolically enough, the Ministry tried to put the kafâla system under tighter control: local and national administration broke down on immigration brokers particularly in the service and small business sector, where the kâfil could shun the restriction immigration and bypass legal processes of migration management implemented in large-scale labour import. The private sector resisted saudisation policies which failed to meet their objectives. Saudisation nevertheless revealed the tension between the state and private institutions in immigration processes and procedures. State control over the foreign labour force is often presented as a means to enforce labour law and the rights of foreign workers, as private or even informal processes allow exploitation and abuses. But the efficiency of migration policies is limited by the interest of private actors and private interests within the state apparel benefiting from the “rent” that migration represents.

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.

The GCC states have two mostly separate labor markets, one for citizens and the other for non-citizens. Pay scales and working conditions in the citizen labor market are almost invariably better than pay and conditions in the non-citizen labor market for workers with similar skills. The creation of a privileged labor market for citizens requires state intervention in labor markets, and this occurs largely through the provision of state jobs to citizens. In the richer Gulf states (Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait) citizens who are employed are employed almost exclusively by the state or state-owned-enterprises. Most figures suggest that only around 10% of citizen employees are employed by private sector firms. Non-citizen migrants, by contrast, overwhelmingly work in the private sector. This bifurcation of the job market is widely seen as a serious problem in Gulf societies, and Gulf states have adopted policies intended to lure (or compel) citizens to take up employment in the private sector. These efforts have met with limited success. Discussion of these policies in the literature tend to examine the policies from the point of view of economic rationality, and proposed solutions to the problem tend to be cast in terms of their economic logic. The bifurcation of Gulf labor markets, however, is first and foremost a political problem, and it is politics that determines the success or failure of any particular policy that aims to move citizens into the private sector labor market. In this paper I propose to present at the upcoming 2011 Middle East Studies Association conference, I will examine the policies that have resulted in the bifurcated labor market in the region, and the policies that have been proposed to lessen the effects of this bifurcation. In examining these policies, I will focus on the political motivations behind the adoption of the policies, the distributional consequences of these policies for different groups in society, and the corresponding likelihood that these policies will succeed in light of political realities in the Gulf states today.

This paper gives an overview of the movement of people and money in the GCC countries. People are attracted to the Gulf region because of its relative stability and massive natural resources supply that made it home to some of the highest standards of living in the world. Historically, the demand of foreign labor was mostly met from neighbouring Arab countries. This trend continued until 1991 when after the Gulf War there has been a structural change in the demand of foreign workers. GCC countries’ preference switched from Arab foreign workers to labor from South Asia. While the literature on migration has documented this change, this paper adds the remittances dimension. This change in labor preference is clearly evident in the remittance outflows and inflows in MENA. Remittance outflows from MENA (mainly the Gulf) matched remittance inflows from 1970 to 1991. After 1991, remittance outflows maintained their upward trend while inflows decreased and never recovered enough to keep up with the outflows. Since 1991, the money that used to be remitted from the GCC to MENA labor exporting countries is being sent now to South Asian countries. The paper examines the potential consequences of this modification in the source of foreign labor by focusing on the monetary flows aspect. The literature has examined this phenomenon by mainly focusing on the social (composition of labor and female share) and political (relationship with Arab neighbours) context. Remittance flows recently have been a source of concern for GCC countries because they represent large money leakages in the economy that could have been otherwise invested in the local economy. For instance, in 2007, the mean size of official remittances was close to 26% of domestic investments in the Gulf; with values ranging from a low of 17% in Kuwait to a staggering 51% in Oman. The paper argues that while the shift from Arab to Asian workers has been motivated by several factors, future GCC governments’ labor policies need to take remittance outflows into consideration. The policy followed by the GCC countries since the early 1990s has created a major shift in the direction of monetary flows from MENA to South Asia. For that matter, to assess the impact of the policy of shifting the source of foreign labor, policy makers should add remittances to the mix. In light of the latest political unrest in the MENA region, this topic is of great significance.