Workers at the site of a residential tower being built in Dubai, in July, 2023. In a region home to more than 35 million migrant workers, mostly from South Asia, many of those killed in strikes have been foreign labourers filling the lowest-paid roles in Gulf economies.KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images
The war on Iran has scrambled global markets and disrupted energy supplies, but it now also threatens one of the world’s largest migration routes: that of workers from South and Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf region.
Some 35 million migrant workers live in the Gulf region, the bulk of them from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Philippines. They are vital both to the economies of the Gulf itself, which are highly reliant on foreign labour, and to their home countries, with the nine million Indians in the region sending home an estimated US$50-billion a year in remittances.
That flow of money and people is now in jeopardy, as the war has upended travel and jobs in the Gulf, even putting foreign workers in physical danger. Among the 14 civilians killed in the region since the fighting began, eight were foreign nationals from Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and India, according to a tally by Agence France-Presse.
Last week, two Indian workers were killed and nine injured in a drone attack near an industrial site in Sohar, Oman. The Indian government has set up a special control room to offer assistance to migrants there, while some Indian states have committees overseeing their safe return.
Already, an estimated 260,000 Indian nationals have returned home on evacuation and commercial flights, according to India’s Ministry of External Affairs.
Iran says it will strike regional energy facilities after Trump’s demand to reopen Strait of Hormuz
Thousands of Filipinos have also repatriated with government assistance, Manila said, while hundreds more are waiting to do so.
With families relying on them for support, and poor job prospects back home being one of the reasons they emigrated in the first place, many workers cannot afford to leave the Gulf, even as the situation worsens.
For the millions of migrant workers who remain posted across the region’s construction sites, ports, industrial zones and hospitality, retail and sanitation sectors, the war has brought increasing uncertainty, with reduced workdays, lost wages and the possibility that they may have to leave at short notice.
One 25-year-old Indian worker spoke with The Globe and Mail from a labour camp in Dubai. He said he and his four roommates, including his brother, who work for a government-owned aluminum plant near the UAE city’s port, all have bags packed with their passports and other documents, packets of dried fruits and sets of clothes, in case they get sent back in an emergency.
“Many of my colleagues have already gone back to India,” he said. “We get updates every day on our phones. The working hours have been reduced. Due to safety concerns, we have been told to work indoors and avoid open areas and windows. We have to keep the WiFi on on our phones so they can trace and evacuate us if needed.”
The Globe is not identifying the workers quoted in this article, as they were not authorized by their employers to speak with the media.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Iran threatened to escalate their war by attacking energy facilities in the Gulf, a potential widening of hostilities that could deepen a regional crisis and add to concerns in global markets.
Reuters
Alarmed by television coverage of the conflict, the man’s father called from India and urged his sons to return home if they felt unsafe. But unless the government charters a plane, this may not be possible: Air fares from the Middle East have soared, and the brothers’ family depends on their earnings, which are roughly four times what they would make in India.
Other countries may not be able to afford repatriations at all, said Sumedha Dasgupta, a senior analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Smaller South Asian economies are highly reliant on remittance flows for domestic consumption, including Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, which collectively receive more than 50 per cent of all remittances from the Gulf.
“A sharp drop in aggregate remittances from the Gulf region could reduce the ability of some South Asian nations to fund their external liabilities, owing to their importance as a source of foreign currency,” Ms. Dasgupta said. “The logistics around the return of a large number of migrant workers will also be difficult to manage for these smaller nations without help from India or China.”
While some migrants looking for ways out are still able to earn and send money home in the meantime, for others, work has yet to begin.
A 35-year-old worker who reached Abu Dhabi three weeks ago along with a group of friends from his village in India was promised a job as an electrical technician with a private company.
“We have not received our work IDs, so we cannot start working,” he told The Globe. “Though we have been provided accommodations, we have to manage the rest of our expenses ourselves, with no wages.”
Andrew Coyne: The consequence of Trump’s war on Iran is a still-metastasizing military disaster
Estimates from Indian recruitment agencies suggest that more than 300,000 jobs could be delayed because of the conflict. In Bangladesh, at least 40,000 workers have been stuck at home, unable to reach their workplaces, putting their contracts and work visas at risk.
Imran Khan, a labour migration expert and assistant professor at the New Delhi Institute of Management, said workers from South Asia began arriving in the Gulf en masse during the oil boom of the 1970s.
“What boosted this outflow was that there were fewer emigration barriers to the Gulf compared to the U.S. and Europe, particularly for semi-skilled and unskilled workers, with added language and religious connectivity, since a large number of workers going there are Indian Muslims,” he said.
Before this war, the Gulf was seen by many migrants as a highly stable destination, but there have been major disruptions in the past. After Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait in 1990, prompting a U.S.-led response, some 30,000 Filipinos were flown out of both those countries and Saudi Arabia, the largest repatriation in the Philippines’ history until hundreds of thousands returned home from around the world during the pandemic.
For India, the crisis has exposed a need to diversify its labour migration strategy to reduce dependency on the Gulf, Prof. Khan said. India is the world’s top recipient of remittances, receiving US$135.4-billion last year, 38 per cent of that from workers in Gulf.
Doug Saunders: The conflict in Iran is a war without interests
In the Philippines, too, the risk of losing a key source of income prompted lawmakers to adopt a resolution last week urging banks and other financial service providers to waive or reduce transaction fees to help ease the financial burden on workers in the Gulf and their families.
“We’re a major exporter of labour services. We have 2.5 million Filipinos in the Middle East,” said Eli M. Remolona Jr., the governor of the country’s central bank, earlier this month. “And they send a lot of money home. About 18 per cent of remittances come from the Middle East. So that’s a concern.”
Gabriele Ciminelli, an economist at the Manila-based Asian Development Bank, said that while remittances are quite stable − with workers often forgoing spending on themselves in order to send the same amount of money back home − for developing countries, “if there are less dollars coming from abroad, that means there’s less money to pay for imports.”
This is particularly concerning for some economies that are already facing spiking fuel and energy costs as a result of the war in Iran. “At the same time the price is going up, they may have less foreign currency to pay,” Mr. Ciminelli said.
The crisis in the Gulf has exposed both the economic significance and vulnerability of the migrant workforce there, said Namrata Raju, a New Delhi-based migration policy researcher.
“In the Gulf, they work within the kafala employer sponsorship framework, where workers are tied to a single employer and practices such as mobility restrictions and wage theft have long been criticized,” she said.
Many workers also arrive in the region with significant debt, having taken loans from informal lenders and emigrated via informal recruitment agents and networks. That debt can take months to repay, and any disruption hits their entire chain of earning.
“In any conflict, migrant workers are often among the most exposed, because they are the ones living in more vulnerable housing or working in riskier conditions,” Ms. Raju said. “They inevitably remain at the periphery, and their welfare becomes an afterthought. We need to highlight their plight.”