Tricked and Trapped: Human Trafficking in the Middle East, ‎pdf 4.1 MB

workers, often requiring them to take part in what amounts to an auction
to gain visas for work opportunities abroad. Many of those interviewed had
borrowed money, whether from relatives or friends, individual brokers in
their villages, or banks. Similar experiences were documented across the
Middle East. In order to secure an employment offer, a Nepalese man had to
pay 110,000 Nepalese rupees (NPR: US$900), which required “taking a loan
from the bank, which was only possible after we had mortgaged the small
plot of land that we owned”.
Reliance on PEAs forces many migrant workers into crippling debt. A
senior civil society leader based in Qatar, who asked to remain anonymous,
underscored the consequences of such debt. “The low-skilled migrants have
financial problems back home, so when they arrive, they are under terrible
pressure from their families and need to recover their investment. The rate of
suicide is very high among those who have to go back, as they are ashamed not
to be able to bring dollars home.” 213 An official from the Nepalese Embassy in
the UAE emphasized a similar point: “What is sad is that they are poor people,
so although they are getting less money than what was initially agreed to in their
country, they still have to work as they spent a lot of money to come here.” 214
The same vulnerability to debt was highlighted by the results of a survey of
Asian workers in Qatar: Half of those interviewed had paid recruiting agencies
a fee before leaving home; the average fee was 2,000 Qatari rials (US$550), and
some had paid much more, putting themselves deep in debt. 215
Vulnerable migrant workers desperate to find work are easy targets for
unscrupulous agents looking for chances to make a profit. Indeed, agents
often impose excessive and unauthorized fees on workers in very precarious
situations, knowing that they will accept these terms because they are under
pressure from their families to remit badly needed money home. Indebtedness
is often the first step in the cycle of deception and coercion in which workers
become trapped. 216 As a recent ILO quantitative survey of migrant workers
in Kuwait and the UAE found, “the recruitment fees and interests on loans
charged to foreign workers … may in turn limit workers’ bargaining power
over the terms of the official work contract. This translates into involuntary
servitude through excessive work hours with little or virtually no pay for
months.” 217
213
Interview with a civil society leader, UAE, 31 Jan. 2012.
214
Interview with an official from the Embassy of Nepal, UAE, 1 Feb. 2012.
215
ITUC: Hidden faces of the Gulf miracle: Behind the gleaming cities of Doha (Qatar)
and Dubai (UAE), stories of migrant workers with few rights and inhuman living
conditions (Brussels, May 2011), p. 16.
216
D. Rannveig Agunias: Migration’s middlemen: Regulating recruitment agencies in the
Philippines–United Arab Emirates corridor (Washington, DC, Migration Policy Institute,
June 2010), p. 12.
217
ILO; Kuwait Economic Society; University of Sharjah: Travels of hope, toils of despair,
p. 14.
104