Transnational labor migration is one of the most visible features of our globalizing world. The International Organization for Migration estimates that there are 214 million migrant workers crossing national borders in the world today. Migration both in and to the Middle East constitutes an important part of this movement of laborers and has deep roots. In the mid-fifteenth century, workers across a broad spectrum of occupations, including stevedores, boatmen, and bakers, trekked from areas in eastern and central Anatolia to the new imperial Ottoman capital, Istanbul, where they lived and worked for months and even years. Workers from outside the Middle East also have been part of the fabric of life in the region for several centuries, the slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa, which long supplied labor for a variety of purposes, being one of the most notable. Migrant workers took on new significance in the twentieth century, especially after the oil price hikes of 1973. Today the nations on the Arabian Peninsula, the destination for most workers, have the highest ratio of migrants to locals in the world.

This paper looks at various circumstances of labor migration from South Asia to Iraq between 1900 and 1935. It stresses that inter-regional labor migration existed to varying degrees before, during, and after the First World War. This was predominantly a function of longstanding commercial ties besides the wartime engagement. At another level, the article offers an interpretation of how labor migration intersects with imperial formations as well as nationalisms evolving in both realms. It argues that the issue of migration to Iraq has to be seen in the context of a plethora of interventions and demands in the relationship between India and the Persian Gulf region over a much longer time period.

The conventional historiography on popular and labor protest in the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf since the Second World War tends to ascribe a negative role to migration. Migrants—dragooned into the service of expanding oil economies—are often depicted as undermining the cohesion and efficacy of indigenous labor activism and popular protest. This article adopts a different perspective. It revisits the most important twentieth-century wave of pan-Arab, secular, republican, and socialist protest in the region—that of the 1950s and 1960s—and highlights the positive contribution migrants made. They were not just quotients of labor power, but interpretive and political subjects. Palestinians, Yemenis, and others, along with return- and circular-migrants, exiles, and visitors, transmitted pan-Arab and Leftist ideas, helped build activist organizations, and participated in a variety of protests. I suggest that standard forms of endogenous socioeconomic determinism in the labor history of the region need rethinking.

How do migrants assert their rights as workers when they do not enjoy the rights of citizenship in their countries of employment and are unable to assert their human rights through international conventions? This article focuses on the work of Migrante-International's Middle East chapter in Saudi Arabia. Specifically, it examines the ways Philippine migrants strategically assert their rights as Philippine citizens transnationally in local labor struggles. This case study of transnational labor activism in a region where migrant workers enjoy limited rights not only highlights how migrants exercise their agency in spite of major obstacles, but it also offers up novel ways to think about worker organizing within the context of contemporary neoliberal globalization for labor activists and scholars concerned with the labor rights of migrants.

The geographic region of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) comprises one of the most fascinating immigration regions of the world, hosting millions of migrants and receiving thousands of new migrants each year. While the panorama of MENA's immigration arena is extremely diverse, this article aims to investigate project-tied, or contract-based, labor migration from Turkey, which occurs mostly through the long-established work of Turkish companies that engage in various construction and service-sector businesses. Taking the analytical context of migration system theory into consideration, the main aim of this essay is twofold: while it attempts to document the dynamics and mechanisms of contract-based labor migration from Turkey to the MENA countries, it also intends to elaborate on research about migratory systems between Turkey and the MENA region, mainly referring to macro-level factors affecting the relevant migration system.

This paper will shed light on the deportation process of visaless sojourners staying and working in Israel. I will explain how state bureaucrats, specifically border control officers of the Enforcement Unit of the Interior Ministry (in Hebrew, hamemune al bikoret hagvulot beyekhidat ha'akhifa, misrad hapnim) are able to conduct activities that cause suffering to sojourners while still viewing themselves as moral human beings, by breaking down the decision-making process into a series of dichotomic categories, by defining Zionism as a context that justifies deportation, and by governing their emotions. I claim that in Israel, state bureaucrats view sojourners as unmanageable and incorrigible. Consequently, deportation becomes a logical course of action. Such an approach, which stresses the bureaucratic aspect of national projects, enables a better understanding of how the “State” is able to perform large-scale projects that cause suffering to individuals.

This article explores the political dynamics of labor migration in the Middle East. It seeks to explain the politics of Arab population movements by looking at historical trends in regional integration and contends that migration to the oil-rich countries, including refugee flows, has been the key factor driving Arab integration in the absence of effective institutions and economic integration processes. To account for the influence of this largely forgotten factor, the article looks at the formal and informal institutions that have shaped massive labor flows from the 1970s onward. It offers historical evidence pointing to the role of migration in Arab regional integration by looking at free circulation of Eritrean refugees and migrants in the Arab region using oral history and administrative archives. Linking labor migration, refugee movements, and regional politics, the article introduces the concept of “migration diplomacy” as an analytical framework and argues that the politics of regional integration can be better understood when looked at through the lens of migration.

Building upon theories of the state as an “effect” of multiple, sometimes contradictory practices and narratives, I argue that Indian business elites in Dubai play an important role in both bounding the state as distinct from the economy and legitimizing its power. I focus, therefore, on the forms of citizenship and subjectivity that are being produced in Dubai and how the legitimacy of the state relies not just on the recruitment of citizen subjects, but also on those who are excluded from belonging—like Indian elites in Dubai. Neoliberal narratives and practices of economic “freedom” by elite expatriates mask the ways in which foreign elites are complicit with the state in producing social and economic hierarchies that benefit both citizens and elite expatriates while maintaining a structure of labor migration that significantly disadvantages the majority of foreign residents living in the United Arab Emirates.

This article explores relationships between religious and economic practices in Kozhikode, a medium-sized city in Kerala. We examine debates concerning the apparent decline of the “bazaar economy” in the face of the onslaught of globalization and the consequent emergence of a “new economy.” The latter is felt locally to be overdetermined by capital and entrepreneurial practices connected, either directly or indirectly, to the combined effects of migration to the Gulf countries of West Asia and to the post-1991 liberalization of the Indian economy. We argue that these public debates are not simply reflections on the harsh reality of economic rationalization, but underscore the production and articulation of specific economies of morality and affect. We also perceive a drawing together of seemingly divergent orientations, sensibilities, and practices—namely, those commonly associated with reformist Islam and what in recent literature has been described as “neoliberal global capitalism.”

Many who study colonialism have noted that the same words used by the colonizer to describe the colonized—“dirty,” “backward,” “uncultured,” and “possessing an improper understanding of the value of work and property”—were often identical to those that rich people used to describe the poor. They were the terms the “modern” used to describe the “not yet modern”; the urban the rural; the educated the uneducated. To use a British example: Those who wrote from positions of power (the urban, educated bourgeoisie) looked down upon, first, the urban poor, then the rural poor, then the Scottish, then the “half-civilized” Natives of North America; then, finally, they squinted from on high upon the Aborigines of Australia. All of these groups fell short of the “norm,” the way the colonizer understood the very height of modern progress. All of these groups were “lacking” something. Thus, in sometimes surprising ways, colonialism merely seems to be another manifestation of the exertion of power over the powerless, a relationship much closer to that of “class” than many expect. This is especially so in a field that produces much of the best work in cultural history, and where anything hinting at old-fashioned “labor history” is gauche (no pun intended). Yet, as the authors of the books under review argue, understandings of labor and property, and the manner with which they are tied to an understanding of nature, are more fundamental to the history of modern colonialism than, for example, race, the latter a category almost always invoked by the colonizer in a completely instrumental fashion.

Contract work in India, though legally regulated by a 1970 Act, is widespread and mostly unrecognized. With the implementation of neoliberal policies in India since the 1990s, contract work has become the norm. There are now few spaces in which contract workers can get redress through the legal system. Using oral history narratives of contract workers' participation in a labor movement, this article shows how narratives of contention differ in the rendering of agency, success, and future, between one group of contract workers employed in the 1970s in a state-owned mine and another employed in the 1990s in an industrial area owned by private and foreign capital. The evidence for the article is ethnographic, collected in Chhattisgarh region in central India. This article suggests that these workers' narratives show the transformation in practices of citizenship, resistance, and militancy in India over time. Such differences are essential in understanding phenomena like the resurgence of the Maoist movement in Chhattisgarh.