Why Do They Keep Coming? Labor Migrants in the Persian Gulf States

Abstract

Based on sustained and multi-sited ethnographic work, this book chapter seeks to explain why migrants continue to flow to the wealthy states of the Arabian Peninsula despite the problems, challenges, and exploitations that many transnational labor migrants encounter there. The chapter concentrates on three overlapping explanations: poverty and structural violence in the migrant sending countries; misinformation and disinformation that shapes migrants' decisions to migrate; and the image and aura that migrants themselves construct around their time abroad.

Keywords: Qatar, Migration, transnational labor migration, Arabian Peninsula, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Kafala