Beyond “Modern-Day Slavery”: Bangladeshi Migrants, Kafala, and a Decolonial Sociology of Labor Migration

• In Event: Work, Education, and Migration

Abstract

This paper advances a decolonial critique of dominant frameworks used to understand temporary labor migration to the Gulf. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with Bangladeshi migrants in Qatar, it challenges the widespread “modern-day slavery” narrative that frames migrants primarily as passive victims of the kafala system. Through detailed life histories of two migrants, Mohammed and Rahman, the paper demonstrates how migrants actively negotiate debt-financed recruitment, informal legality, skill acquisition, and shifting labor markets while sustaining transnational obligations and aspirations. Rather than denying exploitation or legal precarity, the analysis shows how humanitarian and policy-driven discourses obscure migrants’ agency and reproduce Eurocentric binaries of slavery versus freedom. Situating Gulf labor migration within broader formations of South–South mobility and racial capitalism, the paper reframes kafala not as a regional anomaly but as a modern labor regime shaped by colonial legacies and global capitalism. Methodologically, it treats migrants’ narratives not as illustrative data but as sources of theoretical insight, foregrounding negotiation, navigation, and everyday resistance as central analytic categories. By centering migrants’ lived experiences and epistemologies, the paper contributes to migration sociology, labor studies, and global sociology, calling for a reorientation of migration theory that moves beyond humanitarian victimhood and takes Global South migration seriously as a site of theory-building.

Author

• Hasan Mahmud, Northwestern University